Alfred Wegner - Lisa Yount

Alfred
Wegener
Alfred
Wegener
Creator of the Continental Drift Theory
LisA Yount
Alfred Wegener: Creator of the Continental drift Theory
Copyright © 2009 by Lisa Yount
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library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data
Yount, Lisa.
Alfred Wegener : creator of the continental drift theory / Lisa Yount.
p. cm.—(Makers of modern science)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8160-6174-7
ISBN-10: 0-8160-6174-2
1. Wegener, Alfred, 1880–1930. 2. Geologists—German—Biography. 3. Earth
scientists—Germany—Biography. 4. Continental drift. 5. Physical geography.
I. Title. II. Series.
QE22.W26Y68 2009
550.92—dc22 2008025489
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to Kat,
who knows far too much about
earthquakes and tectonic shifts
$
Contents
Preface x
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction xiv
1 Changing Views of the Earth

Earth’s Early Days
1
2
Competing Theories 4
Catastrophes or Steady Change? 7
Charles Lyell (1797–1875):
Founder of Uniformitarianism 8
Progressivism 10
Floating in a Hidden Sea 12
The Age of the Earth 16
Earth Science in Turmoil 18
2 Weather Pioneer
An Active Youth
20
20
Meteorology: The Science of Weather 22
Arctic Explorer 24
Popular Teacher and Writer 27
Wladimir Köppen (1846–1940): Pioneer Climatologist 30
A Bizarre Idea 31
Love and War 35
3 Continental Drift
A Challenge to Geology
38
39
Geologic Time 40
Ancient Continents 41
Another “Continental Drift” Theory 43
A Moving Island 45
Two Layers of Crust 46
Matching Rocks 48
Separated Twins 50
Fossil Climates and Wandering Poles 53
The Motors That Drive the Continents 55
4 “Utter, Damned Rot”

Early Reactions to Drift
58
60
Rejection in America 62
Harsh Criticisms 63
Powerful Feelings 64
Different Approaches to Science 66
Inductive and Deductive Reasoning 66
Starting All Over 68
5 Death on the Ice

Planning an Expedition
70
71
A Frustrating Start 73
Setting up Mid-Ice 75
International Polar Year: A Modern Polar Adventure 78
Visiting Mid-Ice 79
Final Journey 81
A Long Winter 83
A Memorial to Wegener: The Alfred Wegener Institute 84
Grim Discovery 85
6 Rumblings of Change
New Mechanisms for Drift
89
90
Support from South Africa 92
Comic Relief 94
Dragging Gravity 95
Artificial Earthquakes 96
War Spurs Marine Science 97
Scripps, Woods Hole, and Lamont:
Three Pioneering Institutions 98
The Wound That Never Heals 99
Magnetic Moments 103
7
7 The Plate Tectonics Revolution
Seafloor Spreading
106
107
Linking Spreading to Magnetic Changes 109
Converging Lines of Evidence 113
Eltanin 19: “Too Perfect” 114
Shaking up Geology 116
Mathematical Support 118
A New Theory of Earth Movement 119
Plate Tectonics Today 123
Conclusion: Reaching into the Future 127
Chronology 130
Glossary 137
Further Resources 142
Index 150
PrefaCe
S cience is, above all, a great human adventure. It is the process of

exploring what Albert Einstein called the “magnificent structure”
of nature using observation, experience, and logic. Science com-
prises the best methods known to humankind for finding reliable
answers about the unknown. With these tools, scientists probe the
great mysteries of the universe—from black holes and star nurseries
to deep-sea hydrothermal vents (and extremophile organisms that
survive high temperatures to live in them); from faraway galaxies to
subatomic particles such as quarks and antiquarks; from signs of life
on other worlds to microorganisms such as bacteria and viruses here
on Earth; from how a vaccine works to protect a child from disease to
the DNA, genes, and enzymes that control traits and processes from
the color of a boy’s hair to how he metabolizes sugar.
Some people think that science is rigid and static, a dusty, musty
set of facts and statistics to memorize for a test and then forget.
Some think of science as antihuman—devoid of poetry, art, and a
sense of mystery. However, science is based on a sense of wonder
and is all about exploring the mysteries of life and our planet and the
vastness of the universe. Science offers methods for testing and rea-
soning that help keep us honest with ourselves. As physicist Richard
Feynman once said, science is above all a way to keep from fooling
yourself—or letting nature (or others) fool you. Nothing could be
more growth-oriented or more human. Science evolves continually.
New bits of knowledge and fresh discoveries endlessly shed light and
open perspectives. As a result, science is constantly undergoing revo-
lutions—ever refocusing what scientists have explored before into
fresh, new understanding. Scientists like to say science is self-cor-
recting. That is, science is fallible, and scientists can be wrong. It is
easy to fool yourself, and it is easy to be fooled by others, but because

Preface i
new facts are constantly flowing in, scientists are continually refining
their work to account for as many facts as possible. So science can
make mistakes, but it also can correct itself.
Sometimes, as medical scientist Jonas Salk liked to point out,
good science thrives when scientists ask the right question about
what they observe. “What people think of as the moment of discov-
ery is really the discovery of the question,” he once remarked.
There is no one, step-by-step “scientific method” that all scien-
tists use. However, science requires the use of methods that are sys-
tematic, logical, and empirical (based on objective observation and
experience). The goal of science is to explore and understand how
nature works—what causes the patterns, the shapes, the colors, the
textures, the consistency, the mass, and all the other characteristics
of the natural universe that we see.
What is it like to be a scientist? Many people think of stereotypes
of the scientist trapped in cold logic or the cartoonlike “mad” scien-
tists. In general, these portrayals are more imagination than truth.
Scientists use their brains. They are exceptionally good at logic and
critical thinking. This is where the generalizations stop. Although
science follows strict rules, it is often guided by the many styles and
personalities of the scientists themselves, who have distinct individu-
ality, personality, and style. What better way to explore what science
is all about than through the experiences of great scientists?
Each volume of the Makers of Modern Science series presents the
life and work of a prominent scientist whose outstanding contribu-
tions have garnered the respect and recognition of the world. These
men and women were all great scientists, but they differed in many
ways. Their approaches to the use of science were different: Niels
Bohr was an atomic theorist whose strengths lay in patterns, ideas,
and conceptualization, while Wernher von Braun was a hands-on
scientist/engineer who led the team that built the giant rocket used by
Apollo astronauts to reach the Moon. Some’s genius was sparked by
solitary contemplation—geneticist Barbara McClintock worked alone
in fields of maize and sometimes spoke to no one all day long. Others
worked as members of large, coordinated teams. Oceanographer
Robert Ballard organized oceangoing ship crews on submersible
ii Alfred Wegener
expeditions to the ocean floor; biologist Jonas Salk established the

Salk Institute to help scientists in different fields collaborate more
freely and study the human body through the interrelationships of
their differing knowledge and approaches. Their personal styles also
differed: biologist Rita Levi-Montalcini enjoyed wearing chic dresses
and makeup; McClintock was sunburned and wore baggy denim
jeans and an oversized shirt; nuclear physicist Richard Feynman was
a practical joker and an energetic bongo drummer.
The scientists chosen represent a spectrum of disciplines and a
diversity of approaches to science as well as lifestyles. Each biogra-
phy explores the scientist’s younger years along with education and
growth as a scientist; the experiences, research, and contributions of
the maturing scientist; and the course of the path to recognition. Each
volume also explores the nature of science and its unique usefulness
for studying the universe and contains sidebars covering related facts
or profiles of interest, introductory coverage of the scientist’s field,
line illustrations and photographs, a time line, a glossary of related
scientific terms, and a list of further resources including books, Web
sites, periodicals, and associations.
The volumes in the Makers of Modern Science series offer a
factual look at the lives and exciting contributions of the profiled
scientists in the hope that readers will see science as a uniquely
human quest to understand the universe and that some readers may
be inspired to follow in the footsteps of these great scientists.
aCknowledgments
I would like to thank Frank K. Darmstadt for his help and suggestions,
Suzie Tibor for her hard work in rounding up the photographs, my
cats for keeping me company (helpfully or otherwise), and, as always,
my husband, Harry Henderson, for—well—everything.
iii
IntroduCtIon
E verything changes. As time passes, Earth and everything on it

change. Living things are born and die; species develop, flour-
ish for a while, then evolve into new species or become extinct. The
atmosphere, the sea, and even the solid rock of the planet’s crust
change as well. The floor of a shallow sea is pushed up to become a
mountaintop. Mountains are worn down by wind and water and, in
time, may sink beneath the waves.
Science changes as well. Scientists observe details of the world
around them and make guesses about why things are the way they
are and how they might alter in the future. The researchers test these
ideas by making further observations or conducting experiments.
The results of the tests may confirm the original thoughts or lead to
new ones.
In science, as in any other area of human activity, opinions about
people and ideas also change over time. Some scientists are hailed
as geniuses at first, only to be forgotten later. Others’ theories are
rejected by their peers but may be brought back to life when new
evidence to support them is discovered. Sometimes these positive or
negative changes happen within a scientist’s lifetime, but, in other
cases, researchers’ reputations are altered long after their deaths.
A Story of Change
The story of Alfred Wegener and his theory of continental drift is,
above all, a tale of change. Wegener’s idea, first proposed early in
the 20th century, provided a revolutionary picture of the way Earth’s
surface had changed. Wegener believed that continents had moved
together and split apart during the eons of the geologic past, sailing
like vast icebergs through a sea of semiliquid rock. Their motion had
iv
Introduction v
produced new mountains and islands and opened yawning gaps that
filled with ocean water.
Wegener’s life was full of change as well. The son of a minister,
he chose to become a scientist. He was a pioneer in meteorology, the
science that studies Earth’s atmosphere and weather, yet a map that
reminded him of a jigsaw puzzle led him to venture into geology—a
field in which he had no training or experience. He spent most of
his time in university towns of Germany and Austria, but he left
that quiet existence again and again to explore the white waste of
Greenland, where in fact he died.
Finally, the story of continental drift is a story of changes in
scientific thinking. During Alfred Wegener’s lifetime, fellow scien-
tists respected him as a meteorologist and Arctic explorer, but they
ignored or made fun of his theory of moving continents because it
was so different from the ideas that most geologists accepted. The
drift theory was almost forgotten for three decades after Wegener’s
death in 1930, and Wegener himself was dismissed as a teller of
what one scientific critic called “fairy tales.” In the 1960s, however, a
cascade of new discoveries about the seafloor led several scientists to
resurrect Wegener’s ideas and modify them into a new theory called
plate tectonics.
Unlike continental drift, plate tectonics had such powerful evi-
dence in its favor that almost all Earth scientists accepted it within a
few years. It became part of a new view of Earth as a dynamic, ever-
changing system—a “living, mobile thing,” as John Tuzo Wilson, one
of the architects of the new outlook, said in 1968. Historians writing
about this radical change in geology hailed Alfred Wegener, the
creator of the tectonics theory’s ancestor, as the equivalent of Polish
astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), whose revolutionary
picture of the solar system was not accepted in his own time but led
to major astronomical discoveries in later eras.
Revolution in Earth Science

In Great Geological Controversies, science historian Anthony Hallam
called the evolution of geological ideas from continental drift to plate
vi Alfred Wegener
tectonics “one of the most fascinating and best documented [stories] in

the history of science.” This volume in the Makers of Modern Science
set tells that story for young people and profiles Alfred Wegener, the
armchair dreamer and daring explorer who started it all. Wegener’s
life is at the heart of the book, but my account reaches beyond the span
of that life to show why Wegener’s ideas were so harshly received at
first, yet proved so fruitful decades after his death.
Geologists’ reactions to Wegener’s theory grew out of their
beliefs about the nature of Earth and the planet’s development.
These views were the products of the competing theories and puz-
zling observations that shaped the science of geology during the 18th
and 19th centuries. Chapter 1 of the book provides background on
those ideas.
Chapter 2 describes Alfred Wegener’s early life and career, up
to the time he developed and first published his theory of continen-
tal drift. It includes his pioneering meteorological research and his
first two expeditions to Greenland. Chapter 3 presents Wegener’s
theory and the evidence he offered to support it in the fourth and
most complete edition of his book, The Origin of Continents and
Oceans. Chapter 4 tells how contemporary scientists reacted to
Wegener’s ideas and discusses why most of them rejected his pro-
posals so strongly. Chapter 5 recounts Wegener’s last expedition
to Greenland, ending with his tragic death on the ice in November
1930, just a day or so after his 50th birthday.
Chapters 6 and 7 trace the path of continental drift theory after
Wegener’s death. The first part of chapter 6 focuses on the small band
of supporters who kept the theory alive during the 1930s and 1940s
and modified it in important ways. The second part describes the puz-
zling observations that reawakened interest in the idea in the 1950s.
Chapter 7 describes the torrent of new evidence and proposals that
shaped the theory of plate tectonics and led to its rapid acceptance.
The book’s conclusion evaluates Alfred Wegener’s role as a sci-
entific revolutionary. It also shows ways in which the picture of Earth
presented by plate tectonics has altered since the theory’s develop-
ment in the 1960s. It emphasizes that this picture is still being modi-
fied today, because change in science, like change in Earth itself, is a
process that never ends.
Changing Views
of the Earth
P art of being human has always been to wonder . . . to ask ques-

tions . . . to try to discover the answers. Some people sought
their answers in mythology and religion. Others framed their ques-
tions in a different way, which came to be known as science.
Just as people wondered about the sky over their heads and about
their own bodies, they wondered about the Earth beneath their feet.
What was it made of? How far out and how far down did it extend?
Had it always been the way it was now, or was it once different?
Some 2,500 years ago, the ancient Greeks suggested scientific
answers to a few questions about the Earth. Aristotle (384–322
b.c.e.), for example, concluded that the Earth was round because
it cast a circular shadow on the Moon during lunar eclipses. A
later Greek philosopher Aristarchus of Samos (c. 310–230 b.c.e.)
described how the planet’s daily rotation causes day and night.
Eratosthenes of Cyrene (275–194 b.c.e.) even used geometry to

Alfred Wegener
calculate the Earth’s size around 240 b.c.e. Historians have dis-
agreed about exactly what measurements he used, but, according
to one version of his story, he reached an estimate of about 24,389
miles (39,250 km) for the planet’s circumference, a figure surpris-
ingly close to the modern estimate of 24,901 miles (40,075 km).
The Greeks disagreed about whether the Earth possessed more
than one continent, or large landmass. A globe described in 150
b.c.e. pictured four continents, but in 150 c.e., the astronomer and
geographer Ptolemy (ca. 85–165 c.e.) produced a better-known
world map that showed only a single, very large landmass. Long-dis-
tance land and sea voyages slowly expanded Europeans’ knowledge
of geography in later centuries, ending with the first sighting of
Antarctica—the last of the world’s eight continents to be discov-
ered—in 1820. Understanding of how that geography came to be the
way it was, however, lagged behind.
Earth’s Early Days

Perhaps the first complete theory of Earth’s origin, history, and
structure that did not grow out of mythology or religion came
from the French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650). In
Principia Philosophae, published in 1644, Descartes proposed that
the planet had started existence as a glowing ball like the Sun and
then slowly cooled and hardened. As it lost heat, it also shrank in
size. Descartes believed that inner and outer shells of rock, with
a thick layer of water between them, covered the Earth’s fiery
center. Continents emerged when the outer crust broke apart
and some segments of it sank into the water. Key elements of this
theory—the ideas that the Earth had cooled and contracted during
geologic time and that large masses of land, once above water, had
sunk beneath the sea—still dominated many geologists’ thinking in
Alfred Wegener’s time.
Several other thinkers offered different ideas about the Earth’s
past in the late 1700s, when geology began to develop as a science.
Perhaps the first was Georges Leclerc, comte de Buffon (1707–88),
a respected French scientist who included geology among his many
interests. Buffon believed that Earth had been born when a huge
Changing Views of the earth
comet crashed into the Sun and tore off a flaming mass that became
our planet. Like Descartes, Buffon pictured the crust of the early
Earth as having several layers, but he placed them in a different
order. Buffon imagined water as the top layer, the crust itself in the
center, and a honeycomb of huge caves lying beneath it. Eventually
the crust cracked, Buffon wrote, and part of the water drained into
the caves, revealing what became the continents.
Buffon believed that Earth had once been much warmer, just as
Descartes had. He cited as evidence the fossil remains of creatures
much like elephants (who lived in the Tropics in his day) found in the
chilly far north. Northern areas were once warm enough to support
elephants, Buffon said, but, as the planet cooled, they and other tropi-
cal animals migrated toward the hotter lands around the equator.
T. Rupert Jones, editor of a British publication called Geological
Magazine, wrote in 1864 that geology began because people needed
to explain how seashells came to be buried in rocks found on moun-
taintops. Of course Jones was oversimplifying, probably on purpose,
but such shells certainly were one of the chief puzzles that early
geologists faced. Aristotle had noticed them and guessed that parts
of what was then dry land had once lain beneath the ocean. Buffon
thought the same thing. “It was no sooner suspected that our conti-
nent might formerly have been the bottom of the sea, than the fact
became incontestible,” he wrote in a book titled Epochs of Nature in
1778. “The spoils of the ocean are found in every place.”
Other thinkers suggested that the reverse was true: Lands for-
merly above sea level might have sunk. Another ancient Greek phi-
losopher Plato (427–347 b.c.e.) wrote about a large landmass called
Atlantis, which he said had once been the home of an advanced
civilization but sank beneath the sea during a catastrophe long ago.
Plato probably created his version of Atlantis merely to illustrate his
political theories, but he drew on ancient traditions that such lost
continents actually existed. Descartes’s 1644 account contained no
descriptions of lost civilizations, but it carried forward the idea of
sinking as well as rising landmasses.
Buffon realized that the kinds of changes he was describing would
have taken tremendous amounts of time. The idea that the Earth
was ancient, however, went against European religious tradition,
Alfred Wegener
The remains of ancient shells found in land rocks, like these from Chesapeake Bay,
were one of the mysteries that puzzled early geologists. The shells suggested that
parts of Earth’s landmasses had once been under water. (Pam Jeffries/Stockphoto)
which held that the Earth and human beings had been created at the
same time. (In one famous age estimate, made around 1650, James
Ussher, an Irish archbishop, had analyzed biblical texts and ancient
calendar systems and concluded that Earth was created on October
23, 4004 b.c.e.) In what may have been the first attempt to determine
the age of Earth scientifically, Buffon measured the cooling rate of
red-hot spheres and extended his measurements to reach a figure of
about 75,000 years. His observations of fossils made him think that
the planet might actually be far older—perhaps as old as 3 million
years—but he could find no direct evidence to support that idea and
therefore discarded it.
Competing Theories
Two competing theories about the formation of Earth’s crust became
popular in the decades immediately after Buffon’s death. One came
from Abraham Gottlob Werner (1749–1817), a respected professor

of geology in Freiburg, Saxony (now part of Germany). Like Buffon,
Werner believed that water had covered the whole Earth in the
planet’s youth. Werner said that the crust’s earliest rocks had formed
when chemicals in the water settled out as solid matter. Later rocks,
including those that contained shells and other fossils, were formed
from bits of material that drifted down onto the seafloor. Powerful
currents in this primeval ocean shaped the crust beneath it into
mountains and valleys. Because Werner’s ideas stressed the impor-
tance of water, his theory came to be known as the neptunist theory,
after the Roman god of the sea.
Werner taught many of the best geologists of his day, and his stu-
dents spread his ideas throughout Europe. Geologists found the nep-
tunist theory appealing because it provided a clear, simple explanation
for phenomena that they had observed, such as the fact that different
types of rocks were often arranged in layers like a cake. Not every-
one agreed with Werner’s proposals, however. Some critics said, for
instance, that the amount of water currently existing on Earth was too
small to have contained all the material that now made up the planet’s
crust. If there had once been more water, where had it gone?
James Hutton (1726–97), a Scottish businessman with a keen
interest in chemistry and geology, was one of the chief opponents
of the neptunist theory. Hutton believed that heat deep within the
Earth, left over from the planet’s fiery beginning, had done more to
shape the crust than water had. Because of this emphasis on under-
ground heat, Hutton and his followers were called plutonists, from
the Roman god of the underworld.
The Earth’s crust, Hutton said, gained its present form through
repeated cycles of building up and breaking down. Heat from the
planet’s interior expanded and pushed up parts of the seafloor, form-
ing new land. Some of the land wrinkled into mountains, including
volcanoes, which spewed out fresh rock in liquid form. Wind and
water wore down the mountains over time, breaking their rocks into
sand and gravel that rivers washed into the sea. The sand and gravel
settled on the seafloor, and the underlying heat baked them into
solid rock. The same heat eventually pushed up some of this rock to
make new mountains, and so on.
Alfred Wegener
Hutton presented his ideas to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in

1785, and the society published them in 1788. In 1795 he expanded
his presentation into a two-volume work called Theory of the Earth
with Proofs and Illustrations. Hutton’s theory did not become well
known, however, until 1802, when one of his followers, John Playfair
(1748–1819), a professor of mathematics at Edinburgh University,
described it in a book titled Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of
the Earth. Playfair’s writing was far more readable than Hutton’s dif-
ficult prose had been, and his book sold widely.
A number of geological discoveries in the early 19th century
supported Hutton’s ideas and disproved some of Werner’s. Several
of Werner’s best-known followers therefore abandoned the nep-
tunist theory, and interest in it faded out by the mid-1820s. As one
converted British neptunist Adam Sedgwick put it, “For a long while
I was troubled with water on the brain, but light and heat have com-
pletely dissipated [dispersed] it.” Later findings cast doubt on parts
of the plutonist theory as well,
however. Hutton’s true value to
geology lay not in this idea but
in two others that he put forth
in the course of describing it.
One of these notions was
that the Earth was almost infi-
nitely old. Going much further
than Buffon, Hutton claimed
that geologic time showed “no
vestige of a beginning—no
prospect of an end.” Even more
important, Hutton insisted that
all geological changes were due
to actual causes—forces that
James Hutton, a Scottish businessman and could still be seen in opera-
geologist, proposed around the start of the tion. “No powers [are] to be
19th century that Earth’s geography had
been shaped mostly by the planet’s internal employed [in explaining past
heat. He stressed that all changes in the changes in the Earth] that are
Earth during the geologic past were caused
by forces that could still be seen in opera- not natural to the globe, no
tion, such as erosion. (HIP/Art Resource) action to be admitted of except
those of which we know the principle, and no extraordinary events

to be alleged in order to explain a common appearance,” he wrote.
He also stated that “the operations of nature are equable and steady.”
Playfair expanded on these ideas, for instance pointing out that the
pattern of interconnecting valleys running through mountains had
the same shape as the pattern formed by a river and its branches.
This similarity, he wrote, was evidence that, given enough time, rivers
could have carved the valleys by wearing away the mountain rocks.
Catastrophes or Steady Change?

Not all geologists agreed with Hutton that the Earth in the distant
past had been essentially the same as it was in their own time. In
1812, Swiss-French scientist Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) stated
that the planet had been altered by great catastrophes, including
tremendous floods and volcanic eruptions more powerful than any-
thing reported in human history. Cuvier agreed with Hutton that
changes on Earth had taken place in cycles and had come through
the actions of nature rather than supernatural forces, but he thought
that the changes had often been rapid and violent. “It is . . . extremely
important to notice that these repeated inroads and retreats [of land
and sea] were by no means gradual,” he wrote. “On the contrary, the
majority of the cataclysms that produced them were sudden.”
In support of his claims, Cuvier pointed out that the bodies of
elephantlike mammoths, with their skin, hair, and flesh completely
preserved, had been found in the permafrost of Siberia. The corpses’
condition suggested that they had been frozen very quickly, allowing
no time for decay. Further proof came from rock formations, seen in
many places, in which the layers were warped and twisted, like a cake
dropped onto the floor. “The dislocations, shiftings, and overturn-
ings of the older strata [rock layers] leave no doubt that sudden and
violent causes produced the formations we observe,” Cuvier wrote.
Alexandre Brongniart (1770–1847) and Léonce Élie de Beaumont
(1798–1874), two of Cuvier’s followers, developed his ideas further in
the 1820s. Dating layers of rock in mountains by means of the fossils
they contained, the two men showed that some mountains appeared
to be much older than others. Mountain building, they said, had
8 Alfred Wegener
✹ Charles lyell (1797–1875):

founder of uniformitarianism
Charles Lyell was born in Kinnordy, Farforshire, Scotland, on No-
vember 14, 1797, the oldest son in a large family. His father, also
named Charles, was a lawyer, but one of his interests was botany,
the study of plants. Young Charles shared his father’s love of nature.
He had plenty of opportunities to develop his passion at Bartley
Lodge, part of the New Forest area of England, where he spent
most of his boyhood.
Lyell followed his father’s footsteps into the study of law, earn-
ing a B.A. from Exeter College (part of Oxford University) in 1819
and an M.A. in 1821. He began practicing in 1825 and worked as
a lawyer for two years. In college, however, the lectures of natural-
ist William Buckland (1784–1856) had interested him in geology,
and he pursued this interest with increasing energy from then on.
Wherever he traveled to seek legal cases, for instance, he observed
and made notes on the rock formations in the area.
By the time Lyell gave up his law practice in 1827, he had
already established a reputation as a geologist. He was elected to
membership in the Linnean Society and the Geological Society of
London in 1819, the year he graduated from college, and presented
his first scientific paper to the Geological Society in 1822. In 1826
he was also elected a fellow of the Royal Society, Britain’s premier
scientific organization.
Once free to be a full-time author and scientist, Lyell began
developing what would become his best-known work, the textbook
Principles of Geology. Its first edition was published as a three-vol-
ume work between 1830 and 1833. Lyell spent much of the rest of
his life revising and adding new material to this book; he finished the
revision of the first volume of its 12th edition just a few days before
his death. He also published a shorter handbook for students,
Elements of Geology, which first appeared in 1838, and a book
about the age and early development of the human race, Geological
Evidences of the Antiquity of Man, first published in 1863.
Lyell taught geology at King’s College, London, from 1831
to 1833. He married Mary Horner, the daughter of a German
geologist, in 1832, and she thereafter helped him with his work.
He studied the geology of various parts of the world, including
Scandinavia, Italy, Spain, Canada, and the United States, and wrote
scientific papers about the rock formations he saw in those places.
Changing Views of the earth 9
Mid-19th-century geologist
Charles Lyell’s doctrine of uni-
formitarianism, growing out of
James Hutton’s ideas, stated
that all past changes on Earth
had been caused by forces
now in operation. This belief
became a basic principle of
geology. Some geologists,
however, did not share Lyell’s
conviction that those forces
had always operated at the
same rate and intensity that
they show at present. (Library
of Congress)
He also published travel books about his trips to North America in

1845 and 1849.
Lyell’s books sold widely and provided a comfortable income
for him and his family. He also received numerous awards for his
contributions to geology, including the Royal Medal (1834) and Co-
pley Medal of the Royal Society (1858) and the Geological Society
of London’s Wollaston Medal (1866). The British government made
him a knight in 1848 and a baronet in 1864. Lyell died in London on
February 22, 1875, and is buried in Westminster Abbey.
Even more than James Hutton, whose ideas he built upon,
Charles Lyell is considered a father of modern geology. He made
contributions to many geological subjects, including the study of
volcanoes, earthquakes, and glaciers. His ideas about geologic time
and change influenced Charles Darwin (1809–82), the creator of the
theory of evolution by natural selection, who brought the first volume
of Lyell’s text on his famous voyage on HMS Beagle (1831–36).
Although Earth scientists no longer share Lyell’s conviction that geo-
logical changes always took place slowly and steadily, his doctrine of
uniformitarianism is still part of the foundation of geological thinking.
0 Alfred Wegener
occurred at many different times, probably in sudden bursts of activ-

ity. Because of their stress on ancient cataclysms, Cuvier and his sup-
porters became known as catastrophists.
In turn, Charles Lyell (1797–1875), a fellow Scotsman, took up
the cause of Hutton and Playfair. Lyell believed that slow cycles
of rising and falling land had taken place many times in the geo-
logic past, but there had been no overall change in the planet. He
described his ideas in a famous textbook Principles of Geology, which
first appeared in 1830 and was revised and reissued many times
between then and 1872.
Like Hutton, Lyell believed that all past changes in the Earth
were caused by processes still in operation. Lyell went beyond
Hutton, however, in insisting that those processes had always func-
tioned at the same rate and with the same intensity that they showed
in the present day. (“We are not to limit nature with the uniformity
of an equable progression,” Hutton had written.)
Because Lyell shared Hutton’s view that the Earth was very old,
he felt that there had been plenty of time for small, gradual changes to
produce major effects. He saw no need, therefore, to propose ancient
catastrophes. “It appears premature to assume that existing agents
could not in the lapse of ages, produce such effects as fall . . . under
the examination of the geologist,” he wrote. Some past changes, such
as those caused by volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, might have
been sudden, but they did not need to be any more violent than their
modern equivalents. Lyell’s view of Earth’s history, called uniformi-
tarianism, has often been summed up in the slogan, “The present is
the key to the past.”
Progressivism
Most geologists were more interested in describing individual rock
formations than in speculating about the Earth’s past, but those who
enjoyed considering broad theories discussed Cuvier and Lyell’s ideas
vigorously during the 1830s. Many—such as scientist-priest William
Whewell (1794–1866), who coined the terms catastrophism and
uniformitarianism—thought that both men might be partly right.
They agreed with Lyell that the same kinds of forces had shaped the
Earth’s crust in the past and the present, but they thought, along with
the catastrophists, that those forces might have operated at different
rates and intensities at different times. For instance, long periods of
quiet might have been punctuated by sudden bursts of cataclysmic
geological activity. Alternatively, geological processes might have
occurred more quickly or intensely in Earth’s early days, when the
planet was hotter. The view that the speed or intensity of geological
activity might have changed over time was called progressivism.
Although late-19th- and even 20th-century geologists proposed
catastrophist theories now and then, progressivism and uniformi-
tarianism came to dominate geological thinking in Europe (includ-
ing Britain) and the United States by the middle of the 19th century.
Conflict between these latter ideas continued, taking on new forms
in the second half of the century.
One of the most widely held versions of progressivism, popular
since the days of Descartes, focused on the idea that the Earth had
been cooling and contracting since its formation. Nineteenth-cen-
tury supporters of this belief said that mountains formed on the
shrinking planet in much the same way that wrinkles form on the
skin of an apple as it dries out and shrinks with age. Contraction also
forced large blocks of land—even some the size of continents—to
sink beneath the sea, separating areas that had once been joined.
This idea explained why paleontologists (scientists who study ancient
life-forms preserved in rocks) often found fossils of the same kinds of
plants and animals in areas separated by vast stretches of water.
Austrian geologist Eduard Suess (1831–1914) summed up this
view of the planet in a massive four-volume work called Das Antlitz
der Erde (The Face of the Earth), published between 1885 and 1909.
Suess suggested that in the Paleozoic era, the time of the earliest
life-forms that have left fossils (c. 543–248 million years ago), two
huge protocontinents dominated the surface of the Earth. The
northern one, for which he borrowed Plato’s name of Atlantis, lay
where the North Atlantic Ocean now is. The southern continent,
which Suess called Gondwanaland (after a native people of India,
the Gonds), contained parts of what are now South America, India,
and Africa. A central sea, the Tethys, separated the two. The conti-
nents took on their present form when parts of Gondwanaland sank
Alfred Wegener
beneath the sea. As Suess put it, “The collapse of the world is what
we are witnessing.”
Suess believed that land and sea had changed places many times
during the contraction process. His view was popular in Europe,
but most geologists in the United States preferred the theory of
permanentism, which James D. Dana (1813–95), a respected pro-
fessor of geology at Yale University, had set forth in 1846. Dana
shared Suess’s belief that the Earth had cooled and contracted, but
he thought that the continents and oceans had stayed in more or
less the same relationship to each other as the planet shrank. Dana
pointed out that the fossil shells that had been found on land all
belonged to shallow-water species. This meant, he said, that sea
level might rise or fall around the edge of continents, but deep
ocean basins never rose to become continents, nor did the cores of
continents sink. Permanentism was summed up in a popular say-
ing, “Once a continent, always a continent; once an ocean, always
an ocean.” Although Dana’s theory was progressivist in some ways,
it was more closely related to Charles Lyell’s uniformitarianism.
The Earth might have shrunk, Dana said, but in most ways it had
changed very little over time.
Floating in a Hidden Sea

Like Descartes and Buffon before them, some 19th-century geolo-
gists speculated about what might lie beneath the Earth’s crust and
how the crust might interact with the layers beneath it. Their theo-
ries took a new turn at midcentury because of a strange event that
occurred in India around 1840. George Everest, the British surveyor
for whom the world’s tallest mountain was eventually named, was
leading an expedition to measure various aspects of the subcon-
tinent’s geology, including the pull of gravity in different places.
When he tried his measurements in the Himalayas, he received a
considerable surprise.
The more massive an object is, the more strongly it attracts
other objects through gravity. A weight swinging freely on the end
of a string hangs straight down because gravity pulls it toward the
huge mass of the Earth. If other large objects, such as mountains, are
nearby, however, their mass will also pull on the weight, moving it
sideways by a tiny amount that can be measured. When Everest used
this test to measure the gravitational pull of the Himalayas, he found
much less sideways movement than he had expected. The gigantic
mountains acted as if they were hollow!
The startled Everest sent his results to John Henry Pratt (1809–
71), the Archdeacon of Calcutta, who was also a well-known geolo-
gist. Pratt calculated that the deflections, or sideways movements,
that Everest had observed were indeed less than a third as great as
they should have been, given the mountains’ mass. Pratt presented
his calculations to the Royal Society in 1854.
Pratt’s Royal Society paper offered no explanation for his strange
findings. A month after he delivered it, however, George Biddell Airy
(1801–92), Britain’s Astronomer Royal (the country’s chief astrono-
mer), sent in another paper that made up that lack. Airy proposed
that the Earth’s crust was not strong enough to hold up such mas-
sive mountains, so the lowest part of them sank down into the layer
beneath the crust. The mountains aboveground showed less gravita-
tional pull than expected because part of their mass lay beneath the
Earth’s surface.
In order for the “roots” of the mountains to sink down in this
way, the layer below the Earth’s crust had to be soft and yielding,
perhaps even something like a thick liquid, Airy said. (The rock walls
of deep mines were known to be soft, he pointed out.) If this was the
case, then objects floating in the layer should follow the rules that the
ancient Greek scientist Archimedes (c. 287–212 b.c.e.) had estab-
lished for solid objects floating in liquid. The height to which such
objects rose above a liquid’s surface, Archimedes had said, depended
on their mass. Airy compared the different parts of the Earth’s crust
to logs of different sizes lashed together to form a raft. If one log rose
higher above the water than the others, an observer could assume
that the bottom of the log would extend deeper into the water by the
same amount.
Pratt strongly disagreed with Airy’s ideas. In 1861 he put forth an
alternative explanation: the differences in gravity and in height came,
he said, not from differences in total mass but from differences in
density, or mass per unit area. These differences had been built into
Alfred Wegener
Two competing theories explained how landmasses might float on a soft or fluid layer
beneath Earth’s solid crust. Both agreed that objects of different masses would have dif-
ferent heights above the liquid layer. George Airy, Britain’s Astronomer Royal, thought that
heavier masses would reach both greater heights and greater depths (upper diagram).
John Henry Pratt, Archbishop of Calcutta, on the other hand, thought that all the masses
would float at an equal depth. Their differences in height occurred because they were
made of materials with different densities, or masses per unit volume (lower diagram).
the crust by different rates of expansion and contraction during the

planet’s cooling. In Pratt’s theory, all of the crust’s bottom had the
same depth, but parts of it rose higher because they were less dense
than other parts.
In 1889, Clarence Dutton (1841–1912), a U.S. geologist, coined
the term isostasy for the balance that both Pratt and Airy described.
The word comes from Greek roots meaning “equal standing.” Dutton
saw isostasy as potentially becoming “geology’s unifying theory.” The
principle of isostasy states that objects floating in a liquid will always
achieve a balance between the force of gravity, which pushes them

down, and the force of buoyancy, which pushes them up.
Dutton and others went on to show that isostasy provided an
excellent explanation for events in which pieces of crust moved up
or down—perhaps a better explanation than the rival contraction
theory offered. For instance, isostasy predicted that when sediment
was deposited on a piece of land, the land should become heavier
and sink, perhaps being pushed below sea level. On the other hand,
if weight was removed from a landmass, for instance by the melting
of an ice cap, the mass would rise. T. F. Jamieson, a British geolo-
gist, said in 1865 that Finland and Scandinavia were rising because a
gigantic ice sheet that had previously covered northern Europe had
melted 10,000 years ago.
After John Hayford and William Bowie, two respected
American geologists, showed between 1909 and 1912 that predic-
tions based on isostasy closely matched a series of actual gravity
measurements that had been made across the United States, most
geologists came to accept that isostasy was real. They were about
equally divided, however, about whether Pratt or Airy’s theory
about it was the correct one.
Most late 19th-century and early 20th-century geologists and
geophysicists (members of a new scientific specialty, first developed
in the 1870s, that studied the physics and chemistry of the Earth),
especially in the United States, also came to accept the related idea
that a layer of denser but probably yielding material lay beneath the
Earth’s lightweight crust. They could not agree, however, on whether
the layer below the crust was solid, liquid, or some state in between,
like soft tar. Some thought it might be like the ice of a glacier, which
is hard and solid to the touch, yet over geologic eons can flow down
the side of a mountain like a very slow-moving river.
Eduard Suess believed in the contraction-and-cooling theory
rather than isostasy and thought that the layer beneath the crust was
solid, but he did accept that such a layer existed. Naming the layers
after what he thought were the chief elements that composed them,
he called the core nife (for the chemical abbreviations for nickel and
iron, Ni-Fe), the crust sal (silicon-aluminum), and the layer between
them sima (silicon-magnesium). Suess believed that the sal had
Alfred Wegener
migrated upward as the Earth cooled because it was less dense than
the other layers. It had originally covered the entire Earth, but parts
of it had collapsed and sunk into the sima as the cooling planet con-
tracted, leaving behind the ocean basins of today.
Physical evidence that the Earth had multiple layers appeared in
the early 20th century when scientists began measuring the shock
waves given off by earthquakes. These waves travel at different
speeds in different kinds of material. In 1909, Croatian seismologist
(a scientist who studies the way the Earth transmits vibrations from
earthquakes and other sources) Andrija Mohorovičić (1857–1936)
found a sudden increase in the velocity of primary earthquake
waves at a depth of tens of kilometers. This zone, later called the
Mohorovicic discontinuity or Moho, came to be considered the
boundary between the lower crust and the inner layer now termed
the mantle. The Moho lies about 5 miles (8 km) below the ocean
floors and an average of 20 miles (32 km) beneath the continents.
The Age of the Earth

A final controversy that shaped geology in the years just before
Alfred Wegener proposed his continental drift theory concerned
the age of Earth. By the middle of the 19th century, most geolo-
gists accepted Hutton and Lyell’s belief that the planet was almost
infinitely old. They realized that most of the forces that they could
see affecting Earth’s crust, such as the erosion caused by water and
wind, would require hundreds or even thousands of years to show
measurable effects. The existence of a very long span of geological
time therefore became an essential part of their theories.
Hutton and Lyell had not attempted to give an actual figure for
the planet’s age or to date past geologic eras, but Lyell’s friend and
follower Charles Darwin did. In his famous book On the Origin of
Species, published in 1859, Darwin hazarded a guess that the Tertiary
period, the earlier part of the most recent geological era, had begun
more than 300 million years ago.
Just three years after Darwin’s estimate and partly in reply to it,
renowned Scottish physicist William Thomson (1824–1907), bet-
ter known as Lord Kelvin, announced that the crust of the Earth
was only 100 million years old—at most. Kelvin based his opinion
on calculations involving the composition and heat conductivity of
major rock types in the crust and the increase in temperature with
depth that had been measured in mines and similar structures. His
views carried a great deal of weight because he was the most famous
physicist of his time, the formulator of the laws of thermodynamics,
which explain how heat relates to other forms of energy. Physics, in
turn, was usually considered to be the most exact of the sciences.
Kelvin reduced his proposed time span even further in later
estimates until, in 1897, he stated that the planet was probably only
about 24 million years old. Many geologists found this idea distress-
ing because it did not seem to allow enough time for the changes they
saw to take place. If the Earth was really that young, they thought,
catastrophist theories would have to be revived.
In making his calculations, Kelvin assumed that all Earth’s inter-
nal heat was left over from its formation and was radiating steadily
away. Just as he was issuing his most miserly time estimate, however,
scientists in France were discovering a new source of heat: radioac-
tive decay. This phenomenon was first uncovered in 1896, when
Henri Becquerel (1852–1908) found that compounds containing
the element uranium had a strange ability to darken photographic
film. Husband-and-wife physicists Pierre (1859–1906) and Marie
(1867–1934) Curie discovered a second radioactive element, radi-
um, and showed in 1903 that it produced heat as well as radiation
when it broke down, or decayed, into other elements. A year later,
Canadian physicists Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937) and Frederick
Soddy (1877–1956) demonstrated that all radioactive elements were
unstable, breaking down into other elements and giving off energy in
the process. They proposed in 1904 that all radioactive elements, and
perhaps all elements, contained huge amounts of energy that could
be released when their atoms decayed.
Other scientists went on to discover radioactivity in common
rocks, water, and other materials all around the world. It became
clear that enough radioactive material existed in the Earth’s crust to
provide a significant new heat source for the planet. If radioactivity
really did heat the Earth, the planet might not be slowly cooling after
all. Kelvin’s age estimate therefore could be wrong.
8 Alfred Wegener
Since radioactive decay takes place at steady, measurable rates

(different for different kinds of radioactive substances), Rutherford
and other scientists proposed that it could be used to determine
the age of the Earth more accurately than before. In the early years
of the 20th century, after using this method to date individual rock
samples, several scientists did just that. They reported that the oldest
rocks were up to 2.2 billion years old.
Earth Science in Turmoil

The discovery of radioactive decay also threw into doubt the theory
that the Earth was growing smaller over time. If the planet was not
losing heat, it might not be shrinking either.
Other questions had been raised about the cooling-and-contraction
theory. Some scientists had pointed out, for instance, that contraction
ought to produce mountains that were distributed evenly through the
crust. Mountains appeared only in certain places, however—usually at
the edges of continents. In the late 19th century, furthermore, British
scientist Osmond Fisher (1817–1914), a founder of geophysics, had set
out to prove Kelvin’s assumptions about the cooling and contracting
Earth and had found just the opposite. Contraction was simply not
powerful enough to raise mountains to the heights that they reached,
Fisher said. It ought to produce differences in elevation of no greater
than 800 or 900 feet (243.8 to 274.3 m).
In the early 20th century, when Alfred Wegener first proposed his
continental drift theory, Earth science was in a state something like
that of the planet itself. Parts of it seemed solid, immovable, and age-
less, particularly the belief in some degree of uniformitarianism. Just as
Earth’s crust was divided into many types of rocks and rock formations,
Earth science was divided into many specialties that seldom commu-
nicated with one another. Mountains of painstakingly gathered knowl-
edge were surrounded by seas of competing theories and unanswered
questions: Was Earth cooling and shrinking, or had it maintained its
heat and size? Had land and sea changed places in the past, or had they
always remained more or less where they now were? What lay beneath
the planet’s crust, and how did that material behave?
Changing Views of the earth 9
The discovery of radioactivity had recently hit the Earth sciences

like a gigantic earthquake or volcanic eruption, shattering many long-
held assumptions. Geologists, geophysicists, and scientists in related
specialties were still struggling to grasp what this new information
implied. Most felt far from ready to deal with another such explosion.
Weather Pioneer
N either science nor adventure played any part in Alfred Lothar
Wegener’s background. Wilhelm Wegener, his great-grand-
uncle, was a friend of the great German explorer Alexander von
Humboldt, but Wilhelm Wegener himself had been a minister. Alfred
Wegener’s father, Richard, was a minister as well. He also ran the
Schindler Orphanage from 1875 to 1904. This orphanage was not the
dismal home for poor children portrayed in Charles Dickens’s novels,
but rather a private institution and school for the sons of civil servants,
clergymen, and teachers. Perhaps Wegener’s mother, Anna, identified
with their plight, since she herself had lost her parents at an early age.
An Active Youth
When science and adventure moved into the Wegener family, it
arrived in a double dose. Both Alfred, born in Berlin on November
0
Weather Pioneer
1, 1880, and his brother, Kurt, two years older, grew up to become
meteorologists in the pioneering days of that field, when learning
about the Earth’s atmosphere often involved excitement and risk.
Alfred and Kurt were two of Richard and Anna Wegener’s three
surviving children; the third was their sister, Tony. Two other
siblings had died in childhood. Of all these children, Alfred was
the youngest.
Little is known of Alfred and Kurt’s childhood, except that they
often spent time at their family’s vacation home in Zechlinerhütte, a
small country village in northern Germany, about 50 miles (80.5 km)
north of Berlin. (Their mother had been born, as Anna Schwarz, in
that same village.) The boys’ love of the outdoors probably devel-
oped during these country stays. Perhaps less enjoyably, they went
to high school at the Cöllnischen Gymnasium in Berlin, from which
Alfred graduated in 1899.
Alfred and Kurt were certainly leading active, athletic lives by
the time they entered college. They went hiking and climbing in the
Alps during a summer together in Innsbruck, Austria, in 1901, for
instance. A few years later, while visiting a friend in the mountains,
Alfred learned to ski as well.
As has happened to many college students before and since,
the Wegener boys’ activity occasionally spilled over into trouble.
According to Martin Schwarzbach’s Alfred Wegener: Father of
Continental Drift, the only full-length biography of Wegener in
English, Alfred was arrested and fined for “gross misconduct and
disturbing the peace” during his freshman summer at the University
of Heidelberg in 1900. A police officer named Eiermann arrested him
because, the officer reported, “at 3 a.m. [Wegener] paraded down
the main street to the market square wrapped in a white sheet and
shouting loudly in an unseemly manner.”
In spite of a few such wild nights, Wegener did well during his
college years. He did the bulk of his studying at the University of
Berlin, then called Friedrich Wilhelm University. He also spent one
summer each at the Ruprecht Karl University in Heidelberg and
the University of Innsbruck. He studied mathematics and natural
sciences, with a focus on meteorology and astronomy. After earn-
ing a bachelor’s degree in 1901, he took time off for a required year
Alfred Wegener
of military service. He then began graduate studies in astronomy,

meanwhile working at the Urania Society’s observatory in Berlin.
For his doctoral thesis, Wegener translated reference charts
called the Alfonsine Tables from their original form, which used
the number 60 as a base, to the decimal (base 10) form used by
everyone in his own day. These tables had first been developed in
1273 under the patronage of a Spanish king, Alfonso X of Castile,
for use in calculating the positions of the Sun, the Moon, and the
five planets known in those times. Ship captains made such calcula-
tions as part of their navigation duties.
✹ meteorology: The science of weather

Humans have always tried to predict the weather because their lives
depended on it. Weather made crops flourish or fail; weather deter-
mined which ships would reach port safely and which would sink in a
storm. For most of history, though, people could do little more than
watch the sky and pass on what they observed in proverbs such as
“Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.”
Perhaps the first person to try to turn weather prediction into
a science was Aristotle. Around 340 B.C.E. he wrote a book called
Meteorologica, which means “the study of things that fall from the
sky or are suspended in the air.” This included not only what are
now called meteors, but also clouds, rain, and snow. Since Aristotle
lacked equipment to measure such things as air pressure and tem-
perature, it is probably not surprising that most of his ideas about
weather were wrong.
Tools for measuring phenomena in the atmosphere began ap-
pearing in the 17th and 18th centuries. Italian mathematician and
physicist Evangelista Torricelli (1608–47) invented the mercury
barometer, which measures air pressure, in 1643. Low pressure, he
observed, usually meant that a storm was on the way. British scien-
tist Robert Hooke (1635–1703) created an anemometer, a device
for measuring wind speed, in 1667. Gabriel Fahrenheit (1686–
1736), a German physicist, invented the mercury thermometer and
created a temperature scale to go with it in 1714. (A second scale,
the centigrade or Celsius scale, was devised by Swedish astrono-
mer Anders Celsius (1701–44) in 1742. A year later, a French
scientist modified the scale into its present form, which sets the
Weather Pioneer
Wegener received his Ph.D. from the University of Berlin on

November 24, 1904, magna cum laude, for this work. He went
on to write an article on the history of the venerable tables as
well. Nonetheless, he must have found his thesis project boring,
because he concluded soon afterward that his future did not lie in
astronomy. He later summed up his objections to that science in
these words:
In astronomy everything has essentially been done. Only an
unusual talent for mathematics together with specialized
freezing point of water as 0° and the boiling point of water as 100°.)

Swiss geologist and meteorologist Horace de Saussure (1740–99)
invented the hair hygrometer for measuring humidity in 1780.
Even with all these devices, large-scale weather prediction
was not practical until weather data and warnings about danger-
ous events such as storms could be transmitted quickly over long
distances. Samuel F. B. Morse’s (1791–1872) telegraph made
such communication possible beginning in 1844. Shortly afterward,
several countries set up networks of weather stations, connected
by telegraph, that sent their information to central bureaus. These
bureaus, in turn, combined the stations’ data to make weather maps
and forecasts. In the United States, for instance, the Smithsonian
Institution established a national weather observation network of
150 stations in 1849. Britain founded the first national meteorologi-
cal service in 1854, and daily weather forecasts began appearing in
British newspapers in 1860.
By the dawn of the 20th century, when Alfred and Kurt We-
gener were choosing their careers, the study of weather (short-
term changes in the atmosphere) and climate (changes that cover
larger areas and longer periods of time) was just beginning to be
considered a true science. The fact that the atmosphere had more
than one layer had been discovered only in 1902, for instance. A
Norwegian scientist Vilhelm Bjerknes (1862–1951) pointed out in
1904 that weather prediction could be made through mathematical
calculations based on the laws of physics. After that time, meteorol-
ogy became more closely integrated with other physical sciences.
Alfred Wegener
installations at observatories can lead to new discoveries; and

besides, astronomy offers no opportunity for physical activity.
Arctic Explorer
Leaving astronomy behind, Wegener turned to his other chief sci-
entific interest, meteorology, which seemed to offer much more
exciting possibilities. Kurt (who had studied meteorology at a dif-
ferent university) was already working as a technical aide at the
Royal Prussian Aeronautical Observatory in Lindenberg, a suburb of
Berlin, and Alfred joined him there in 1905.
Like other investigators at the observatory, the Wegeners used
kites and balloons to learn about the atmosphere. These floating
devices had been essential tools for weather investigators for several
centuries. Meteorologists had realized that they could understand
weather and climate only by measuring such things as temperature
and wind speed at different heights in the atmosphere, and kites
were one of the first tools they used to carry measuring instruments
into the air. Perhaps the most famous weather kite was the one that
American statesman and inventor Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) flew
in 1752, with a key attached, to try to find out whether lightning was
a form of electricity. Other scientists tied thermometers to kites and
sent them up to measure temperatures at various altitudes.
When Joseph (1740–1810) and Jacques (1745–99) Montgolfier,
two French brothers, invented the hot air balloon in 1783, the infant
science of weather gained another useful aid. Balloons tethered to a
cable could carry instruments high into the air and be easily retrieved.
People could also ride in balloons filled with hot air or hydrogen gas
to make more elaborate measurements or experiments. At the time
the Wegener brothers joined the Aeronautical Observatory, kites
and balloons were the chief tools that meteorologists used to inves-
tigate the upper atmosphere.
Not content with the observatory’s unmanned balloons, Alfred
and Kurt Wegener learned ballooning. On April 5–7, 1906, they
represented the observatory in the Gordon Bennett Contest for Free
Balloons. They won the contest by making a 52-hour unbroken flight
from Bitterfeld, in central Germany, to Jutland, in northern Denmark,
Weather Pioneer
Balloons were (and sometimes still are) used to carry instruments into the atmosphere
to obtain data on weather and climate. Alfred Wegener used weather balloons like this
in his work at the Royal Prussian Aeronautical Observatory and on his expeditions to
Greenland. (Archive/Alfred Wegener Institute)
and then back to a more southerly part of central Germany near

Frankfurt. Their journey set a new record for the longest continuous
time that a balloon carrying human beings had remained in the air,
beating the previous world record by 17 hours.
Floating in the peaceful skies above Germany was not enough to
satisfy Alfred Wegener’s lust for adventure. Since childhood he had
wanted to follow the trail of such famous explorers as Fridtjof Nansen
(1861–1930) into the ice-filled wilderness of the Arctic, and later in
1906 his experience with balloons brought him his first chance to do
so. He was hired as the meteorologist for the Danmark expedition, a
28-man exploration of northeast Greenland. Ludvig Mylius-Erichsen
(1872–1907), a Danish scientist, was the expedition’s leader.
Most of Greenland, the world’s largest island, is anything but
green (although in the Middle Ages, when Scandinavian settlers first
Alfred Wegener
came there, it may have been warmer and, therefore, greener than
it is today). Washed by chilly currents from the Arctic and Atlantic
Oceans, it has an Arctic climate. More than four-fifths of it is covered
by an ice sheet. This massive ice cap, which is said to represent 10
percent of the world’s freshwater reserves, is 2.5 miles (4 km) thick in
places. Its weight has pushed down the central part of the island into
a basin that lies more than 1,000 feet (300 m) below sea level.
The Danmark expedition was largely concerned with learning
about the life of the icy island’s Native people, the Inuit. Wegener
nonetheless had the chance to send kites and captive balloons as
high as 9,843 feet (3,000 m) to make observations about Greenland’s
weather. In doing so, he became the first person to use weather kites
and balloons to collect high-altitude data in a polar climate. He and
other expedition members also made an extensive and dangerous
journey across the island’s largely unmapped northeast coast, some-
times traveling by dogsled and sometimes using sledges that they
dragged themselves.
Wegener’s student and fellow Greenland explorer Johannes
Georgi wrote in Schwarzbach’s Alfred Wegener that the Danmark
expedition allowed Wegener “to put into practice all his physical
and intellectual abilities, his scientific knowledge, and his practical
skill for the exploration of the upper layers of the atmosphere in the
Arctic, for meteorological investigations of all kinds, for astronomy,
meteorological optics, and glaciology.” It also showed him firsthand
how unforgiving the Arctic environment could be. Mylius-Erichsen
and two other team members died during the expedition’s first win-
ter, when they made a foray away from the group’s base camp and ran
out of food before they could find their way back. In spite of this loss,
the rest of the expedition team, including Wegener, stayed on and
completed the planned exploration’s second year, returning in 1908.
Grim as parts of the expedition were, Wegener felt completely
fulfilled in this icy, beautiful land. “Out here, there is work worthy
of a man; here, life takes on meaning,” he wrote in his journal. He
spoke even more poetically of the Arctic in an article he authored on
his return:
Alexander von Humboldt states somewhere in his writ-
ings that there is so little of interest in the polar regions
Weather Pioneer
that expeditions there are not worthwhile. If he could have

stood as we did, under the flickering northern lights, with
an overwhelming feeling of insignificance at the sight of this
phenomenon of nature, . . . he would never have said such a
thing. Above us the shining curtain unfolded in mysterious
movements, a powerful symphony of light played in deepest,
most solemn silence over our heads, as if mocking our efforts:
Come up and investigate me! Tell me what I am!
Popular Teacher and Writer

Shortly after his return to Germany, Wegener began work on a
textbook, Thermodynamik der Atmosphäre (Thermodynamics
of the Atmosphere). The book described how heat interacts with
Alfred and Else Wegener are seen here in their home in Marburg, soon after their
marriage in 1913. Else was the daughter of Wegener’s mentor, climatology expert
Wladimir Köppen. (Neuruppin Museum, August-Bebel Strasse 14-15, Neuruppin, Germany)
8 Alfred Wegener
In 1909, Alfred Wegener became a Privatdozent at the University of Marburg, shown

here. The university did not give him a salary; students who wanted him to teach them
paid him directly. (Thomas Becker/Stockphoto)
other variables, such as air pressure and moisture, in the Earth’s

atmosphere. Late in 1908 he sent a copy of his manuscript to
Wladimir Köppen, an eminent meteorologist then working at the
German naval observatory in Hamburg, for review. According to
Johannes Georgi, Köppen at the time was considered the “grand
old man of meteorology.”
Wegener had asked Köppen’s advice once before, just before
his 1906 Greenland expedition, when Köppen had been head of the
meteorological kite station at Grossborstel, near Hamburg. Their
contact at that time had been brief, but after they consulted on
Wegener’s thermodynamics textbook, Köppen became the younger
man’s close friend and mentor. He also introduced Wegener to his
daughter, Else, who was just 16 years old in 1908, when the two first
met. Else was greatly struck by this handsome young man 12 years
older than herself: “He was still tanned from the Arctic Sun and the
Weather Pioneer 9
sea air,” she recalled later in a book she wrote about Wegener. “His
gray-blue eyes beamed light from his dark face.” Apparently the
attraction was mutual: The two would marry five years later.
Meanwhile, the papers that Wegener wrote about his kite and
balloon observations in Greenland led the University of Marburg to
hire him in 1909 to teach meteorology and astronomy. He was not a
full faculty member, but rather what was called a Privatdozent. This
meant that the university did not pay him a salary; instead, he had to
try to earn a living from fees given him by students and people who
hired him to give lectures. According to university records cited by
Martin Schwarzbach, Wegener taught classes in such subjects as the
physics of the atmosphere, atmospheric optics, and “astronomic-
geographic position-finding for explorers.”
Wegener’s students seem to
have liked him. Johannes Georgi,
who began studying under him
in 1910 and went on to become a
fellow Arctic explorer and close
friend, described his teacher as
“a man of medium height, slim
and wiry, with a face more often
serious than smiling, whose
most notable features were the
forehead and the stern mouth
under a powerful, straight nose.”
Georgi went on to say that
Wegener “quickly won [his stu-
dents’] hearts by the firm yet
at the same time modest and
reserved manner in which he
immediately introduced them to A photograph of Alfred Wegener was
the fundamentals” of meteorolo- taken in 1910, when he was about 30
years old. At that time he was teach-
gy. Wegener explained complex ing at Marburg and writing a textbook
subjects in a clear and simple about the way heat interacts with other
variables, such as air pressure and
manner that students found easy moisture, in the Earth’s atmosphere.
to understand, Georgi recalled, (Foto Marburg Art Resource)
0 Alfred Wegener
yet he never talked down to them. He often enlivened his lectures with
tales of his Greenland adventures.
Wegener’s thermodynamics textbook was published in 1911,
and several well-known meteorologists praised it. Wladimir Köppen
wrote that the book showed Wegener’s “special talent for explicating
difficult problems simply and clearly with a minimum of mathemat-
ics, and yet with no loss of precision.” Although Martin Schwarzbach
points out that, at 30 years old, Wegener was young to be writing
such a work, the text became very popular and went through sev-
eral editions. Indeed, according to Roger McCoy’s Ending in Ice, a
biography of Wegener that focuses on his Greenland expeditions,
Wegener’s book became “the standard textbook for atmospheric
physics in Germany” in the 1910s and 1920s.
✹ wladimir köppen (1846–1940):

Pioneer Climatologist
Wladimir Peter Köppen was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, on
September 25, 1846. His grandfather, a physician, had moved
there from Germany in 1786 to work for the Russian government
under the rule of Catherine II (Catherine the Great, 1729–96).
His father was a well-known geographer, historian, and expert on
ancient Russian cultures.
Like Alfred Wegener, his future son-in-law, Wladimir Köppen was
unusual for his time in being an expert in several scientific fields.
He studied botany, zoology, physics, and climatology at the Univer-
sities of St. Petersburg, Heidelberg, and Leipzig. He obtained his
Ph.D. in botany from the University of Heidelberg in 1870.
After working for several years in the Russian meteorological
service, Köppen moved to Germany in 1875 and became chief of
the new marine meteorology division of the German naval observa-
tory in Hamburg. His first job was to set up a weather forecasting
service for northwestern Germany and the nearby seas. He left the
marine meteorology office after four years, but he continued to
work for the naval observatory as a researcher until 1919, when he
retired and Wegener replaced him.
Köppen applied all his scientific interests to his greatest achieve-
ment, a system for classifying the world’s climates that is still used
Weather Pioneer
A Bizarre Idea
During this same period, Wegener had the inspirations that would
lead to his most long-lasting achievement: the theory of continen-
tal drift. He wrote later that his first thoughts on the subject came
around Christmas 1910 when he looked at a world atlas that a
friend had received, perhaps as a holiday gift. He was struck by the
fact that the outlines of Africa and South America looked as though
they could fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. “Doesn’t
the east coast of South America fit exactly against the west coast
of Africa, as if they had once been joined?” he wrote in a letter to
Else. “The fit is even better if you look at a map of the floor of the
Atlantic and compare the edges of the drop-off into the ocean basin
in a modified form. He recognized that climate determined what

types of plants would grow in an area and that vegetation, in turn,
could be used as a marker for climate. Relating vegetation patterns
to measurements of rainfall and air temperature, he divided the
world into five climate zones: tropical humid, dry, temperate/mild
midlatitude, continental/severe midlatitude, and polar. (University of
Wisconsin geographer Glen Trewartha later added a sixth zone, the
highland.) Köppen first published his climate classification scheme in
1884 but continued revising it for most of his life. The first complete
version appeared in 1918, and the final version was published in
1936, when he was 90 years old.
Köppen also investigated Earth’s climates during past geologi-
cal eras, a field called paleoclimatology. This subject interested
Alfred Wegener as well, and the two wrote a famous book about it,
Die Klimate der Geologischen Vorzeit (The Climates of the Geologi-
cal Past), which was published in 1924. In addition, Köppen wrote
several volumes of a massive Handbuch der Klimatologie (Handbook
of Climatology), which he coauthored with his student Rudolf Geiger,
and several hundred scientific papers. This venerable and produc-
tive scientist certainly lived up to his personal motto, “without haste
and without rest.” He died in Graz, Austria, on June 22, 1940.
32 Alfred Wegener
While looking at an atlas that a friend had received as a Christmas present, Alfred
Wegener noticed that the shapes of South America and Africa looked as though the two
continents could once have fitted together like puzzle pieces, although they are now
separated by the Atlantic Ocean. This observation was the inspiration for Wegener’s
theory of continental drift.
Weather Pioneer
rather than the current edges of the continents. This is an idea I’ll
have to pursue.”
Wegener was not the first person to notice this apparent match.
Roger Bacon (1561–1626), a British statesman and philosopher, had
remarked on it almost 300 years before. Alexander von Humboldt,
the friend of Wegener’s great-granduncle, had mentioned it in his
writings as well. Antonio Snider-Pellegrini, an American living in
France, also had published a book in Paris in 1858 called La créa-
tion et ses mystéres dévoilés (Creation and Its Mysteries Unveiled),
which included a diagram in which a proto-American continent
that he called Atlantide (Atlantis) was snuggled up against the west
side of Africa; Australia was equally cosily tucked under the bulge
of Africa’s eastern side. This arrangement, Snider-Pellegrini said,
explained why fossil plants from the Carboniferous period (354–290
million years ago) in Africa and the Americas were so much alike.
None of these men, however, had discussed this in any detail or
explained in scientific terms what it might mean. At the time his
idea struck him, Wegener wrote later, he had never heard of these
earlier writings.
In spite of his words to Else, Wegener soon dismissed his
thought about the continents having been joined as being, as he
wrote later, “improbable.” Most geologists, he knew, believed that
the continents had always remained in the same positions on the
planet, though parts of them might have been pushed upward
or sunk beneath the sea from time to time in the geologic past.
His strange thought surfaced again in the fall of 1911, however,
when—quite by accident, he wrote—he happened to see a book
describing fossil animals that had lived in West Africa and Brazil
during the Paleozoic era, 542 to 251 million years ago. He read with
amazement that some of the fossils from both places were nearly
identical. The book’s author, like many other geologists of the time,
explained this and other similarities by saying that the continents
had once been connected by land bridges that later sank below sea
level. What Wegener knew of geophysics made him doubt this idea.
Suddenly the alternative—the notion that the continents had moved
horizontally over time—no longer seemed so wild.
Alfred Wegener
The Wegener family shown on a balloon ride, a rare family outing, on April 17, 1912.
Left to right are Alfred; Kurt, his older brother; Else Köppen, his fiancee; and Tony, his
sister. (Foto Marburg Art Resource)
During the next few months, Wegener gathered information

from a variety of scientific fields to support his theory. Almost from
the beginning, he was sure his ideas were right, even though they
contradicted what most Earth scientists of the time believed. He
wrote to Köppen on December 31, 1911, “If it turns out that sense and
meaning are now becoming evident in the whole history of the Earth’s
development, why should we hesitate to toss the old views overboard?
Why should this idea be held back for ten or even thirty years?”
Weather Pioneer
Wegener first presented his proposal in two speeches given

at different scientific meetings in January 1912. He made the first
talk, “The Geophysical Basis of the Evolution of the Large-Scale
Features of the Earth’s Crust (Continents and Oceans),” on January
6 to the Geological Association in Frankfurt. Four days later, he
gave the second, “Horizontal Displacements of the Continents,” to
the Society for the Advancement of Natural Science in Marburg.
He combined the speeches into two papers that were published
later in the year.
Love and War

Wegener’s theory attracted little attention at this time, and excit-
ing turns in his own life soon forced him to set it aside. The first
of these events was a long-awaited chance to return to Greenland.
In 1912 he joined a four-man expedition led by Johan Peter Koch,
a Danish explorer who had been with him on the Danmark trip.
The expedition began with a two-and-a-half-week stay on Iceland,
an Arctic island much smaller than Greenland, during which they
crossed the island (including its mostly unexplored largest glacier,
the Vatnajökull) twice “for practice.” They used Icelandic ponies,
which Koch was planning to take to Greenland for transportation
instead of dogs. Koch hoped that the ponies would be able to climb
the steep slopes of Greenland’s huge glacier more easily than Mylius-
Erichsen’s dogsleds had succeeded in doing.
After arriving in Greenland in the late summer of 1912, Koch’s
party spent the winter on the eastern edge of the inland ice cap;
they were the first explorers to winter on the ice sheet itself. Then,
beginning in April 1913, they made a two-month journey across the
sheet at its widest part, a distance of 746 miles (1,200 km). Using 16
Icelandic ponies, they scaled the steep inland glacier, climbing as
high as 9,843 feet (3,000 m) and narrowly avoiding the huge chunks
of ice that repeatedly broke free of the main mass. The group finally
reached the island’s west coast, but they lost all their ponies and
almost starved before an Inuit group rescued them on July 15. This
was the longest crossing of the ice cap on foot that had been under-
taken up to that time.
Alfred Wegener
Alfred Wegener returned to Greenland in 1912 and 1913 as part of a small expedition
led by Danish explorer Johan Peter Koch. Wegener is shown here at the expedition’s
camp in Borg, Greenland. (Bildarchiv Preussicher Kulturbesitz/Art Resource)
Much of Wegener’s work on this expedition, he said later, con-

sisted of taking photographs of weather-related phenomena, such
as clouds, ice, and the spectacular northern lights. He also gathered
weather and climate data throughout the winter. On his return, he
helped Koch prepare a book on the expedition and on Greenland’s
climatology and glaciology, Durch die Weisse Wüste (Across the
White Wilderness), which was published in 1919. “The account of this
journey is and will remain a classic of the exploration of Greenland,”
wrote Johannes Georgi, who had accompanied Wegener and Koch
on the trip. In 1913, Wegener received a Danish medal, the Knight’s
Cross of the Order of Danebrog, for his part in the expedition, and
the Gesellschaft für Erdkunde (Geological Association) in Berlin also
awarded him and Koch their Carl Ritter Medal.
Shortly after his return from Greenland, Wegener married Else
Köppen, who by then was 21 years old. Their first child, Hilde, was
born in 1914. The long shadow of war soon fell over these happy
events, however: World War I began on July 29, 1914, and Wegener,
Weather Pioneer
a reserve lieutenant in the Queen Elisabeth Grenadier Guards’ Third

Regiment, was called to active duty in Belgium immediately. Kurt,
for his part, became a fighter pilot.
According to a colleague, Professor Benndorf, Wegener had
mixed feelings about his service: he was loyal to his country, but he
felt that war was pointless. Nonetheless, he saw enough action to be
wounded twice later in 1914, first in the arm and later, two weeks
after he had returned to the battlefront, in the neck. Although he
continued to serve in the military meteorological service, he was
relieved of active duty for the remainder of the war. During the time
he spent at home recovering from his wounds, he turned once more
to the theory he had been forced to set aside and began gathering the
additional evidence he would need to flesh it out into a book.
Continental Drift
A lfred Wegener published Die Entstehung der Kontinente und
Ozeane (The Origin of Continents and Oceans), the first com-
plete version of his continental drift theory, in 1915. He revised the
book extensively three times, adding to the evidence supporting
his theory each time; the revised editions appeared in 1920, 1922,
and 1929. The 1922 edition was translated into several languages,
including an English edition, which appeared in 1924. The version
most available in English today is a 1966 retranslation of the fourth
(1929) edition, the final version issued during Wegener’s lifetime.
Fifth and sixth editions, edited by Kurt Wegener, were published
after Alfred’s death.
The basic concept in Wegener’s theory was the one that had
gripped him from the beginning—the idea that the Earth’s conti-
nents had moved horizontally on the planet’s surface during past
8
Continental drift 9
geologic eras. In doing so, they had changed their shape, their
position on the surface, and their relationship to each other and
the ocean basins. Wegener’s term for this motion, the German
word verschiebung, would be most accurately translated as dis-
placement. The theory nevertheless became known in English as
continental drift.
A Challenge to Geology
Wegener’s theory was controversial from its beginning because
it contradicted two other theories that many Earth scientists of
his time accepted. One was the idea that some present-day con-
tinents had formerly been connected by land bridges that later
sank beneath the sea. Paleontologists liked this theory because it
explained why identical or closely related species of living or fossil
plants and animals often appeared in widely separated parts of the
world. These creatures seemed unlikely to have crossed the oceans
that currently separated them or to have evolved so similarly in
separate places.
The sinking of such large areas was thought to be possible
because of a second widely held geological belief: the idea that in its
youth, the Earth was both hotter and larger. As the planet cooled,
supporters of this theory believed, it shrank, causing its crust to
wrinkle. The wrinkling pushed some areas up, forming mountain
chains, and forced others below water level.
Wegener did not accept either of these theories, and he pointed
out recent scientists’ objections to both. The discovery of radioactiv-
ity offered a new possible heat source for the Earth, he said, so the
planet’s core need not be cooling. The shrinkage theory could not
explain why mountains had formed at different times or why moun-
tain chains appeared only in certain places.
In turn, if the Earth was not shrinking, there was no reason for large
landmasses to have disappeared beneath the oceans. Wegener claimed
that the widely accepted principle of isostasy also ruled out the idea of
large sunken landmasses. Such masses would be too buoyant to sink
unless a large weight were placed on them, he said, and he knew of no
geological activity that would have provided such a weight.
0 Alfred Wegener
✹ geologic time
Drawing on measurements of radioactive decay in rocks from the
Earth, the Moon, and elsewhere in the solar system (meteorites),
Earth scientists today have concluded that the Earth, like the rest
of the solar system, is about 4.5 billion years old. Geologists divide
this expanse of time into a timescale with units of several sizes.
The largest divisions in the geological timescale are called eons.
Each eon is divided into eras, and each era is split into periods.
Smaller divisions within periods (epochs, ages, and chrons) are also
used. Traditionally, the geological timescale is shown with the oldest
time at the bottom and the most recent time at the top, so that it
resembles the way layers of rock are stacked in the Earth’s crust.
Alfred Wegener’s description of continental drift involves only the
later part of the Phanerozoic eon—the time during which multicellu-
lar living things with body parts hard enough to have formed fossils
have existed on Earth. In the following table, eras and periods are
shown only for this eon.
Time Span
Eon Era Period (millions of years ago)
Phanerozoic Cenozoic Neogene 23–present
Paleogene 65.5–23.0
Mesozoic Cretaceous 146–65.5
Jurassic 200–146
Triassic 251–200
Paleozoic Permian 299–251
Carboniferous 359–299
Devonian 416–359
Silurian 444–416
Ordovician 488–444
Cambrian 542–488
Proterozoic 542–2,500
Archaean 3,800–2,500
Hadean 3,800–4,500
Note: Alternatively, the Cenozoic era is sometimes divided into the Tertiary
period, dating from 65.5 to 2.6 million years ago, and the Quaternary
period, from 2.6 million years ago to the present. (The terms primary and
secondary were once applied to earlier eras, but they are no longer used.)
Continental drift
As an alternative to the theory of sinking land bridges, Wegener

noted, some geologists accepted James D. Dana’s proposal that land
and sea had changed places only around the edges of continents.
Wegener did not completely agree with this permanentist theory
either. Yet powerful geophysical evidence, such as the evidence for
isostasy, supported Dana’s idea, just as biological evidence supported
the land bridge theory. If either concept were rejected, the facts that
favored it would have to be reinterpreted.
Wegener maintained that continental drift provided the new
explanation that was needed. The idea that the continents had
moved horizontally over geologic time fitted with the facts sup-
porting both of the other theories, he claimed. It also resolved the
contradictions between them. In the fourth edition of The Origin of
Continents and Oceans he wrote:
If drift theory is taken as the basis [of understanding the
Earth’s history], we can satisfy all the legitimate requirements
of the land-bridge theory and of permanence theory. . . .
There were land connections, but formed by contact between
blocks now separated, not by intermediate continents which
later sank; there is permanence, but of the area of ocean
and area of continent as a whole, . . . not of individual
oceans or continents.
Ancient Continents
Wegener wrote that in the Paleozoic era, more than 250 million years
ago, all of the Earth’s crust that reached above sea level was gathered
into a single huge continent. In the second and third editions of his
book, he called this protocontinent Pangaea, meaning “all-Earth.” It
occupied about half of the planet’s surface area and was surrounded
by a single shallow ocean, Panthalassa (“all-sea”).
Pangaea broke up and its fragments slowly separated from each
other during the Mesozoic era, Wegener claimed. In the Jurassic
period, it split into three smaller protocontinents, two northern
ones and a southern one. One of the northern continents was
more or less the same as present-day Asia; the other consisted of
what is now North America, Greenland, and Europe. Wegener did
42 Alfred Wegener
Continental drift 43
Y Another “Continental Drift” Theory

Frank Bursley Taylor (1860–1938), a geologist who worked for the
U.S. Geological Survey, published a theory of continental movement
somewhat like Alfred Wegener’s in 1910, two years before Wegener
presented his first talk on continental drift. Taylor’s chief interest,
however, was not continents but mountains. His theory was intended
to explain the origin of the large, curved mountain ranges on the
eastern and southern borders of Asia, which continued into the
Mediterranean region. All these mountains, including the Alps and
the Himalayas, had arisen at about the same time in the relatively
recent geologic past (Mesozoic era).
Taylor rejected the idea that these mountains had been formed
because the Earth had cooled and contracted, as Eduard Suess
and many other geologists believed. “The Earth never was a molten
globe. The whole idea is pure Cartesian [from René Descartes]
fiction,” he wrote in a later version of his theory, published in
1926. “Its internal temperature has been substantially constant for
unnumbered ages.” Instead, he said, the mountains resulted from
massive movements of Earth’s crust that began after the planet’s
gravity captured a comet in the Cretaceous period (144–65 million
years ago). The comet became our Moon. This cataclysmic event
flattened the formerly spherical planet at the poles and increased
its speed of rotation. The gravitational pull of the new Moon, much
closer to Earth than it is now, also created powerful tides.
Taylor proposed that all of the Earth’s land had originally existed
as two protocontinents centered over the north and south poles. The
effects of the Moon’s capture made these supercontinents break up.
Most of the pieces drifted toward the equator in what Taylor called
(continues on next page)
(Opposite page) According to Alfred Wegener’s continental drift theory, all of Earth’s
landmasses were once part of a single supercontinent that he called Pangaea (all-Earth).
Pangaea began breaking up about 200 million years ago (1). By 180 million years ago,
Pangaea had split into a northern and a southern landmass (2). Borrowing a term from
an earlier researcher, Wegener called the southern continent Gondwana. A later scien-
tist, Alexander du Toit, named the northern continent Laurasia. The widening Atlantic
Ocean separated the Americas from Africa about 65 million years ago (3). India had
broken free from Africa but had not yet attached itself to Asia. The continents are still
changing positions slowly today (4). For instance, the Atlantic Ocean is widening.
Alfred Wegener
(continued from previous page)

“a mighty creeping movement,” much as ice sheets crept down
some of the continents in later times. Some of the masses collided
with obstacles, pushing up “wrinkles” that became mountain ranges.
The Himalayas and India’s Pamir plateau arose, for instance, when
part of the southward-moving former northern continent ploughed
into the ancient mass of the Indian subcontinent.
In their wake, Taylor’s account continued, the moving continents
left great tears or rifts in the crust that became the basins of the
Arctic, South Atlantic, and Indian Oceans. The Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a
chain of gigantic undersea mountains known to run north and south
down the center of the Atlantic Ocean, marked the rift created when
Africa separated from South America. Taylor also said that Green-
land, Canada, and northern Europe had once been joined. The North
Atlantic now occupies the space that opened up between them.
Taylor did not work out the movements of the continents in
detail, and he presented little geological evidence to support his
proposals. His ideas about the Moon, furthermore, were probably
too much like catastrophism for geologists’ comfort. Because of
these failings, his theory, presented to a meeting of the Geological
Society of America on December 29, 1908, and published in the
society’s Bulletin in July 1910, attracted little attention.
Alfred Wegener mentioned Taylor in the fourth edition of his
book, but he wrote that he had not heard of Taylor’s theory at the
time he developed his own ideas. Wegener’s theory was certainly
much more complete and more carefully supported than Taylor’s.
Although some American geologists called continental drift “the Tay-
lor-Wegener theory” at first, Taylor’s version was ultimately forgotten.
not name these continents, but for the southern protocontinent,

made up of Africa, South America, India, Australia, and Antarctica,
he borrowed Eduard Seuss’s name of Gondwanaland (or simply
Gondwana). He wrote that Gondwana, in turn, began to break
up in the Cretaceous period, but the pieces of the northern block
remained together until late in the Cenozoic era, perhaps 3 million
years ago. As the blocks of land separated, they tended to move
westward and toward the equator.
Continental drift
A Moving Island
Because Wegener’s drift theory contradicted several widely held geo-
logical beliefs, he knew that he would need a great deal of evidence to
convince other scientists that his idea had merit. In the two decades
between the first formulation of the drift theory and his death, he
assembled supporting facts from a wide variety of Earth sciences,
including geodesy (the measurement of the size and shape of the
Earth), geophysics, geology, paleontology, and paleoclimatology. This
breadth was highly unusual in a time when scientists rarely stepped
outside their own specialized fields of study. “All Earth sciences must
contribute evidence towards unveiling the state of our planet in ear-
lier times,” Wegener wrote in the foreword to the fourth edition of
his book.
Wegener used most of his book to describe this evidence. He
admitted that all of it was indirect: It fitted with or supported his
theory but did not prove it. “We are like a judge confronted by a
defendant who declines to answer, and we must determine the truth
from the circumstantial evidence,” he wrote in the foreword to the
book’s fourth edition. “All the proofs we can muster have the decep-
tive character of this type of evidence.” In spite of this limitation,
Wegener believed that the quantity and variety of his evidence were
so great that they amounted to proof.
Wegener organized his facts according to the different Earth
sciences from which they came, devoting a chapter to each scientific
branch. He began with geodesy, which involves precise measurements
of latitude and longitude. The Danmark expedition had made such
measurements in Greenland in 1907, and earlier scientists had made
similar ones at almost the same spots in 1823 and 1870. Greenland’s
movement away from Europe, Wegener said, was expected to be the
fastest among current landmasses. Since the movement was in an
east-west direction, it would be shown by increases in the difference
in longitude between the two lands.
Wegener admitted that these measurements might not be
completely accurate. First, they had not all been made at exactly
the same spot, although he said they had been adjusted to correct
for this problem. Second, the measurers had determined time of
Alfred Wegener
day, an essential part of the calculations, by referring to charts of

the Moon’s position in the sky. Such charts were less accurate than
time signals transmitted by radiotelegraph, which geodesists were
beginning to use in the 1920s. Even so, Wegener felt that these early
figures were precise enough to be valuable, especially when they
were grouped with two more from scientists in 1922 and 1927 who
did use radiotelegraphy.
Put together, Wegener said, all these measurements showed
that Greenland was gaining longitude (moving westward) relative to
Greenwich in Britain, the arbitrary zero longitude point, at the rate
of 118 feet (36 m) a year. This increase was nine times as large as
the average error expected in the observations. “The result is there-
fore proof of a displacement of Greenland that is still in progress,”
Wegener wrote (the italics are his). He offered sets of latitude and
longitude measurements for several other continents and islands
that also appeared to show movement of the landmasses. Geodesic
figures like these were the best evidence that parts of Earth’s crust
had moved in the past, Wegener claimed, because they demonstrat-
ed that such movement was still occurring.
Two Layers of Crust

Turning to geophysics, Wegener presented evidence to support the
idea that the Earth’s outer shell has two layers. First, he said, mea-
surements of the crust’s heights and depths, including what little
was known about the parts under the ocean, fell into two main sta-
tistical groups: continental tables, averaging 755 feet (230 m) above
sea level, and deep seafloors, about 15,420 feet (4,700 m) below sea
level. Very few figures fell in between. In other words, continental
shelves extended under shallow seas and then dropped off abruptly
to the depths of the true ocean floor. “In the whole of geophysics
there is probably hardly another law of such clarity and reliability as
this—that there are two preferential levels for the world’s surface,”
Wegener wrote.
Wegener also provided several reasons for thinking that the two
layers were made of different materials. One reason came from mea-
suring seismic waves, or waves of force given off by earthquakes. These
Continental drift
waves travel through different kinds of rock at different speeds. They

had been shown to move through the rocks of the ocean floor about
0.062 miles (0.1 km) per second faster than through the rocks of the
continents. Geomagnetic research had also shown that the rock of the
ocean floor was more easily magnetizable than most continental rock
and therefore probably contained more iron. Finally, samples of rock
obtained in deep-sea dredging had usually proven to be basalt, a dense,
iron-containing rock believed to have come directly from the Earth’s
molten interior. Basalt was seldom found on land except as part of the
lava thrown out of volcanoes.
Using terms slightly modified from those coined by Eduard
Suess, Wegener called the two layers of the Earth’s crust sial and
sima. He wrote that sial (a term he thought was less confusing than
sal because sal is also the Latin word for “salt”) is relatively light-
weight and composed mainly of rocks related to granite. All the land
above sea level, as well as the continental shelves under the shallow
seas near coastlines, is sial, Wegener said. The sial layer of the conti-
nents is about 62 miles (100 km) thick. On the ocean floors, by con-
trast, this layer is very thin—about 3 miles (5 km) thick at most—or
perhaps even nonexistent. The sima layer beneath the sial consists
mainly of basalt, which is denser and heavier than the granitelike
rocks that make up sial.
Wegener, like a number of geologists, believed that the sima,
even though made of solid rock, acted like a thick, or viscous,
liquid. Such an idea might seem strange at first, he admitted, but
he gave several examples of solids that behave like thick liquids
under some circumstances. The Earth might seem as hard as
steel, but even steel can flow like a liquid under great heat and
pressure, Wegener pointed out. Pitch, a form of petroleum, also
sometimes acts like a solid—shattering under a hammer blow, for
instance—but it sags slowly as gravity acts on it over time. “The
Earth behaves as a solid, elastic body when acted upon by short-
period forces such as seismic waves,” Wegener wrote. “However,
under forces applied over geological timescales, the Earth must
behave as a fluid.”
Support for the idea that the sima acted like a viscous liquid
also came from the widely accepted geophysical concept of isostasy,
8 Alfred Wegener
Wegener said. If the lower layer of crust was soft enough to permit
the rising and falling movements thought to be caused by isostasy,
such as the uplift of Scandinavia, he saw no reason why it should
not allow horizontal movements as well. The movements would
be almost imperceptibly slow, but over the ages of geologic time
they could occur if some force impelled them. Wegener, the Arctic
explorer, wrote that pieces of sial (continents and islands) floated
on and moved through the sima layer as icebergs move through the
polar oceans. The sluggish sima slowly gave way before the moving
blocks of sial and then closed up behind them, much as syrup or
honey does if a person drags a finger through it.
Matching Rocks
Wegener offered extensive arguments from geology to support his
idea that certain continents had once been joined together in larger
landmasses. If the edges of the continents had once lain side by side,
he wrote, rock formations that had developed before the separation
should be similar on both sides of the break, just as the edges of a
photograph ripped in half would show similar light and dark areas
because they had once been part of a single picture. In fact, Wegener
said, this was the case in certain places. The match between rock
formations in the Cape Mountains of South Africa and the Sierra de
la Ventana, mountains lying just south of Buenos Aires, Argentina,
was especially striking, he noted. Vast, rocky plains found in South
Africa and Brazil were also very similar. The resemblances between
these plains included pipes of kimberlite and related minerals that
produced valuable diamonds for both countries.
In much the same way, matching formations on opposite sides of
the North Atlantic showed spots where North America and north-
ern Europe had once been attached like conjoined twins, Wegener
claimed. For instance, he believed that the Appalachian mountain
chain of eastern Canada and the United States was a continuation
of a worn-down chain that covered parts of southwest Ireland and
Brittany, a part of France. He said that another ancient mountain
range, the Caledonian, had matching parts in the Scottish Highlands
and northern Ireland on one side and Newfoundland, part of Canada,
on the other.
Continental drift 9
To Wegener, these detailed matches in rock formations pro-

vided some of the strongest evidence for drift theory. He wrote the
following:
The conjunction brings the continuation of each formation
on the farther side into perfect contact with the end of the
formation on the near side. It is just as if we were to refit the
torn pieces of a newspaper by matching their edges and then
check whether the lines of print run smoothly across. If they
do, there is nothing left but to conclude that the pieces were in
fact joined in this way.
Suppose, Wegener’s book said, that the first pair of matching
formations—the Cape mountains of South Africa and the sierras of
Buenos Aires—made the odds 10 to one that the drift theory was
correct. Since at least six independent matches of this type were
known, Wegener claimed that the odds went up to 106, or 1 million
to one, in drift theory’s favor. “These figures may be regarded as
exaggerated, but they should show the significance of a plurality of
independent tests,” Wegener wrote.
Still other geological formations showed different stages in the
process of continental splitting, Wegener said. The first stage was
visible in narrow, deep rift valleys such as those seen running north
and south through East Africa. These rifts slowly widen and deepen
and, when they reach the edges of the continents, eventually fill with
ocean water.
Wegener believed that both mountains and islands resulted
from continental movement. Some mountain ranges, such as the
Himalayas and the Tian Shan of China, came from crumpling pro-
duced as the edges of continental blocks collided. Others, including
the ones that line western North and South America and continue
around the rim of the Pacific Ocean to form the Ring of Fire, were
produced as the leading edges of continental blocks plowed through
the resisting sima.
Trailing edges of the continental blocks, on the other hand,
often broke off and remained struck in the ocean floor as the con-
tinents continued on, forming groups of islands that have an easily
recognizable curving (arc) shape. Volcanoes usually appear along
the inner side of the curve. The bulging outer side, by contrast,
0 Alfred Wegener
shows earthquake faults and, often, deep ocean trenches. Wegener

said that the Malayan archipelago (group of islands), off southeast-
ern Asia, is the most striking example of an island arc.
Separated Twins
Just as certain rock formations on different continents showed a
degree of similarity that only drift theory could easily explain, fos-
sil plants and animals in many of the same places showed equally
striking resemblances, Wegener went on. He claimed that the con-
tinental drift theory could account for these matches at least as well
as the popular theory of sunken land bridges. A type of fern called
Glossopteris and a family of small Permian reptiles named meso-
saurs were among the fossil twins he mentioned. Glossopteris fos-
sils appeared in India, Australia, South America, South Africa, and
Nearly identical fossils of certain plants and animals can be found on several continents
now separated by vast oceans. Alfred Wegener believed that the fossils were so similar
because the continents were once part of a single southern continent, Gondwana.
Some of the fossils whose distribution impressed Wegener the most are shown here.
Continental drift
Earthworms obviously cannot swim across oceans, but very similar species of earth-
worms are found in Europe and the northeastern areas of North America. Wegener
believed that this similarity provided further evidence for his continental drift theory.
(Goga, 2008, Shutterstock, Inc.)
Antarctica—the same landmasses that Wegener said had once made

up the southern supercontinent of Gondwana. Mesosaur fossils were
found only in South Africa and Brazil.
Paleontological connections between Europe and northeastern
North America were less clear, but Wegener wrote that types of organ-
isms possessing closely related species in both places included earth-
worms, pearl mussels, perch (a type of fish), garden snails, and heather
(a brushy plant). In the case of the snails, which are found widely in
western Europe and the British Isles but elsewhere only in Labrador,
Newfoundland, and the eastern United States, he commented:
The theory of sunken continents . . . must interpolate a very
long hypothetical bridge in order to connect the two small
areas of distribution; with the accumulation of such cases, it
becomes increasingly unlikely that the eastern and western
boundaries of the distribution would have lain just on today’s
Alfred Wegener
Except for one species of opossum that lives in North America, marsupials (pouched
mammals) like this Australian brushtail possum are found only in Australia and South
America. Alfred Wegener felt that this distribution of animals indicated that the two
continents once were joined. (Sandra Caldwell, 2008, Shutterstock, Inc.)
Continental drift
continents rather than on the wide continental bridge—that

is, in today’s ocean.
Living organisms show similarly odd distributions, Wegener
said. He wrote that compared to the animals of the Sunda Islands,
part of the Malay Archipelago lying just north of Australia, the
animal life of Australia “is like something so foreign as to have
come from another world!” According to him, the animal species
thought to have been on Australia the longest, which are found
mostly on the southwestern part of the continent, show relation-
ships with the animals of India, Ceylon, Madagascar, and south-
ern Africa. This reflects Australia’s connection with those lands,
which ended when Gondwana began to break up at the start of the
Jurassic period. The marsupials, or pouched mammals, so charac-
teristic of Australia and some South Pacific islands arrived later
and appear mainly in only one other area—South America. (One
species of opossum lives in North America.) Even the marsupials’
parasites are nearly identical in the two places, as Wegener noted.
“I believe that the Australian fauna [animals] will provide the most
important material that biology can contribute to the overall prob-
lem of continental drift.”
Fossil Climates and Wandering Poles

By the time Wegener assembled the last edition of his book on con-
tinental drift, he and his father-in-law, Wladimir Köppen, had also
written their book on paleoclimatology. Some of their discoveries in
this field also supported drift theory, Wegener believed. In addition,
they fitted with the idea that in previous geological eras, the Earth’s
internal axis had shifted, causing the planet’s North and South Poles
to “wander” to locations different from their present ones. This
change would have altered the climate of various areas substantially.
Wegener described several kinds of evidence that reveal the
fossil climates that different continents had experienced in the
past. One is the traces of former inland ice sheets left in the form
of rock deposits called tillites. Seams of coal, considered to be fos-
silized peat beds—packed masses of decayed plant material—offer
Alfred Wegener
another. Thick masses of coal mean heavy plant growth under damp
(swampy) conditions, which suggests a tropical climate. Minerals
that form underwater but are later found on land, reflecting changes
in sea level, provide a third climate indicator.
The distribution of fossil plants and animals also offers indi-
rect evidence of changes in climate, Wegener wrote. For example,
Spitsbergen, an island north of Scandinavia (part of Norway), now
has a polar climate and is buried under inland ice. Fossils from
the early Tertiary period taken from Spitsbergen, however, show
several kinds of trees that grow in temperate climates, such as
pines, beeches, and oaks. Still further back in time, in the Jurassic
and early Cretaceous periods, sago palms—a tropical plant—grew
in this now-frozen land. Wegener also stated that all the present
southern continents, as well as the Deccan area of India, had gla-
ciers at the end of the Carboniferous period and the beginning of
The fact that the southern continents, most of which now have tropical climates,
were largely covered by glaciers like this one in the late Carboniferous and early
Permian periods suggested to Alfred Wegener that the South Pole had once lain
under southern Africa. All those continents, then part of Gondwana, would therefore
have had a polar climate. Alfred Wegener climbed this particular glacier, the Vat-
najökull in Iceland, at the start of his Greenland trip with Johan Koch in 1912. (Vera
Bogaerts, 2008, Shutterstock, Inc.)
Continental drift
the Permian. They therefore must have had a polar climate at that
time. By contrast, none of the present northern continents had
glaciers then.
Wegener maintained that this glacier evidence also offered
strong support for the idea of polar wandering. He believed that at
the time the southern glaciers existed, the South Pole lay more or
less under the center of the protocontinent Gondwana. The North
Pole, on the other hand, was under the Pacific Ocean, so no land
was close enough to be affected by its climate. He also pointed
out that a huge, thick belt of coal, the remains of plants deposited
during the Carboniferous period, stretches across North America,
Europe, Asia Minor, and China. This is exactly where the equa-
torial climate, with its constant rain and year-round heavy plant
growth, would have been if the poles were in the location Wegener
described. He wrote:
Not only the Permo-Carboniferous traces of glaciation, but
also the total climatic evidence of that period falls into place
with the application of drift theory and forms a climatic sys-
tem which corresponds completely to that of today, provided
the South Pole is displaced to southern Africa. With the pres-
ent-day position of the continents, however, it is altogether
impossible to combine the data into an intelligible system of
climates. These observations therefore constitute one of the
strongest proofs of the validity of drift theory.
“The overwhelming majority of geologists” accepted the idea
that there was a considerable displacement of the North and South
Poles during the Tertiary period, Wegener claimed. He went on to
discuss the concept of polar wandering in more detail. He defined it
as a movement of the Earth’s whole crust relative to its lower layers,
representing an internal shift in the planet’s axis.
The Motors That Drive the Continents

Toward the end of his book, Wegener considered possible forces
that could produce the movement of landmasses he was proposing.
He admitted that he could not explain the causes of continental
Alfred Wegener
drift very well. This did not worry him, however, because he felt that
the evidence that drifting had in fact occurred was so overwhelm-
ing. “The Newton of drift theory has not yet appeared,” he wrote,
referring to the British scientist Isaac Newton (1643–1727), who
had explained the law of gravity. Wegener added, “His absence need
cause no anxiety.” He was sure that later research would reveal the
motor that drove the crust’s movement.
The only two mechanisms Wegener could think of were what he
called “flight from the Poles” (Pohlflucht) and tidal effects in the crust.
Hungarian physicist Loránd Eötvös (1848–1919) had first described
Pohlflucht in 1913. It was caused, Eötvös said, by centrifugal force
from the Earth’s rotation and by the bulge at the slightly flattened
Earth’s equator, whose increased gravity pulled landmasses toward
it. The tides could produce friction that dragged on the Earth’s crust,
slowing the crust’s rotation and making it move westward relative
to the interior. Both Pohlflucht and tidal drag are very weak forces,
Wegener admitted, but he believed that over the eons of geologic
time, their effects could be significant.
A third possible mechanism, for which evidence was just begin-
ning to be accepted at the time Wegener prepared his final edition,
was convection currents in the sima. These currents occur in a
liquid or gas that contains areas at different temperatures. Imagine
a pot of water sitting on the burner of a gas stove, for instance. The
burner’s flame heats the water immediately over it first, making
the molecules in that area move faster. This increased movement
causes the water in that spot to expand and rise. When the hot
water reaches the surface of the liquid, the colder air above it makes
it cool down again. More hot water rising from below pushes the
cooler water toward the sides of the pot, where it contracts and
sinks downward. The water is thus in constant motion as parts of
it continually change places.
Heat from the Earth’s interior was expected to make the sima
hot. Some geologists believed that this heat radiated easily from the
deep seafloors, where only a thin layer of hardened rock separated
the sima from the chilly ocean waters. It built up, however, under
the thicker blocks of crust that made up the continents. This uneven
heating would make sima rise up beneath the continental blocks,
Continental drift
flow along them to their edges, then cool and sink as it passed
beneath the oceans. Friction caused by these currents might break
up the continents, Wegener thought.
Alfred Wegener felt he had assembled an impressive collection
of reasons for believing that the continents could move around the
Earth’s surface. It remained to be seen whether other Earth scientists
would accept his revolutionary idea.
“Utter, Damned Rot”
A lfred Wegener returned to Marburg in 1918, after World War I
ended in Germany’s defeat. He and Else had a second daughter,
Käthe, that year; a third, Charlotte, arrived two years later.
Wegener’s family, like most Germans, had to deal with shortages
of food and other necessities for a while. Wegener’s academic life,
on the other hand, prospered. Wladimir Köppen retired from his
post at the German Marine Observatory in 1919 (though he would
continue to remain active in science for many decades), and the
observatory chose Wegener to replace his father-in-law as director of
their department of theoretical meteorology. Wegener, Else, and their
daughters therefore moved into the lower floor of the Köppens’ house
in Hamburg, while Wladimir and his wife, Marie, moved upstairs.
Wegener was also reunited with his brother when Kurt became the
head of another department at the observatory in that same year.
8
“Utter, damned rot” 9
One of Wegener’s accomplishments during his years in Hamburg

was a book on the origin of the Moon’s craters, published in 1921. He
wrote, correctly, that the craters came from the impacts of meteors,
not volcanic eruptions as some other geologists thought. He also
authored a number of papers on meteorology as well as the second
and third editions of his book on continental drift. He gave lectures
at the University of Hamburg as well. In 1922, he and another scien-
tist Erich Kuhlbrodt went on a sea voyage to Cuba and Mexico and
measured upper air currents over the Atlantic. Knowledge about
these air currents was expected to be important once transatlantic
air travel became common.
Most important, Wegener and his father-in-law worked togeth-
er on a book called Die Klimate Geologischen Vorzeit (Climates of
the Geological Past), a pio-
neering work in paleoclima-
tology that was published in
1924. Its picture of ancient
climates was closely tied to
Wegener’s continental drift
theory, which Köppen, after
being skeptical at first, had
come to accept. According
to Martin Schwarzbach, “No
one before . . . had offered as
thorough and consistent an
interpretation of the Earth’s
climatic history” as the two
men did in this book.
In spite of these achieve-
ments, Wegener was frus-
trated. Time after time he
applied for a professorship
at German universities but
This photograph shows Alfred Wegener in
was turned down. His friend 1925, soon after he became a professor at
and former student, Johannes the University of Graz (Austria). Geologists
were strongly criticizing his continental drift
Georgi, believed that these theory at this time. (Bildarchiv Preussicher
rejections occurred because Kulturbesitz/Art Resource)
0 Alfred Wegener
Wegener’s work strayed outside of his own field of meteorology, a

dangerous behavior in that era of rigid specialization. Wegener’s con-
tinental drift theory, furthermore, had made him a controversial figure
both in his own country and overseas, and most universities did not
welcome mavericks.
Austria proved more understanding than Germany. In 1924, the
University of Graz offered Wegener a professorship in meteorology
and geophysics that it had created just for him. He accepted, and his
family and the Köppens moved to Graz. They soon became Austrian
citizens. Else Wegener wrote later that the family’s years in that uni-
versity town, within sight of the Alps, were the happiest of their lives.
During Wegener’s years in Graz, his research focused mostly on con-
tinental drift and on plans for further exploration of Greenland.
Early Reactions to Drift

It was fortunate that Wegener found personal fulfillment in these
posts, because his drift theory was sailing through rough seas.
Neither his 1912 papers nor his 1915 book had been well received
in German-speaking Europe. In 1918, for instance, Fritz Kerner-
Marilaun (1866–1944), a highly regarded Austrian paleoclimatologist,
referred sarcastically to the “delirious ravings of people with bad cases
of moving crust disease and wandering pole plague.” On the other
hand, Émile Argand (1879–1940), founder of the Geological Institute
of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, and an expert on the Alps, defended the
drift theory at an international geological meeting in 1922 because he
felt that it explained certain puzzling features of those mountains. For
the most part, although Wegener’s book attracted enough interest
for him to publish revised and expanded editions in 1920 and 1922,
Germanic geologists simply ignored his proposal.
Philip Lake, a British geologist, provided one of the first major
reactions to Wegener’s theory in the English-speaking world. Lake
reviewed the second edition of Wegener’s book for Geological
Magazine in August 1922. This review, and a speech on the same
subject that Lake gave to the Royal Geographical Society in London
in January 1923, presented many of the same objections that later
critics would make. To begin, Lake protested that Wegener “is not
“Utter, damned rot”
seeking truth; he is advocating a cause and is blind to every fact that

tells against it.” In other words, Wegener was violating the unwrit-
ten rule that a scientist’s public writing should appear to be objective
rather than openly favoring any theory, even the researcher’s own.
Lake admitted that Wegener was “a skillful advocate and
present[ed] an interesting case.” However, Lake doubted that
continents could move horizontally, particularly under the forces
Wegener had proposed. He questioned data such as the height
statistics that Wegener gave to show that the Earth’s crust had two
layers. He also pointed out that in order to achieve the neat fit that
appeared in his maps, Wegener had altered the present-day outlines
of the continents a great deal. Lake wrote:
It is easy to fit the pieces of a puzzle together if you distort
their shapes, but when you have done so, your success is no
proof that you have placed them in their original positions. It
is not even a proof that the pieces belong to the same puzzle,
or that all of the pieces are present.
Lake found Wegener’s matches between widely separated moun-
tain ranges such as the Caledonian folds of Scotland and the moun-
tains of eastern Canada equally unconvincing. The supposedly
matching rocks of South Africa and South America, he said, had
not yet been mapped well enough to show whether they were really
similar or not. Lake pointed out that Glossopteris fossils and signs
of glaciers in the Permian and Carboniferous periods appeared, not
only in the places Wegener had mentioned, but also in spots such as
northeastern Persia, northern Russia, Siberia, and North America,
which did not fit with Wegener’s maps at all.
Most of the Royal Geographical Society scientists who discussed
Wegener’s ideas after Lake’s presentation basically agreed with Lake.
Several thought that horizontal movement of the continents might
be possible, but they doubted that Wegener’s description of it was
correct. Even so, they felt that Wegener should receive credit for
having proposed a thought-provoking idea. At the end of the discus-
sion, the president of the society, the Earl of Ronaldshay, concluded
The impression left on my mind by the discussion is that geol-
ogists, as a whole, regret profoundly that Professor Wegener’s
Alfred Wegener
hypothesis cannot be proved to be correct. . . . Some theory of

this kind is required to explain facts which have long been
known to geologists and while they feel bound to condemn
this particular hypothesis . . . they still hope that some other
hypothesis of a kindred nature will be discovered which will
satisfy their requirements.
Rejection in America
Unlike the earlier versions of Wegener’s book, the third (1922) edi-
tion was translated into other languages. When the English edition
appeared in 1924, most Earth scientists outside the German-speak-
ing world learned about Wegener’s theory for the first time. Some,
such as Harold Jeffreys (1891–1989), an eminent geophysicist at
Britain’s Cambridge University, did not like what they saw any better
than Lake had. Jeffreys stated, for instance, that Pohlflucht and tidal
forces were a million times too weak to move the continents.
British scientists’ reaction to Wegener’s ideas was mild, how-
ever, compared to opinions in the United States. American Earth
scientists expressed their feelings especially vigorously at a meeting
sponsored by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists
that was held in New York City on November 15, 1926. This con-
ference, the first international meeting to discuss Wegener’s the-
ory, was titled “Theory of Continental Drift: A Symposium on the
Origin and Movement of Land-masses both Intercontinental and
Intracontinental, as Proposed by Alfred Wegener.” Twelve scien-
tists—nine Americans (including Frank Taylor, author of a rival drift
hypothesis) and three Europeans—attended. Perhaps fortunately for
him, Alfred Wegener was not among them. However, he did send
in a short paper offering clarification and new data on two topics
discussed in his book.
A few of the scientists at the meeting favored Wegener’s theory,
or at least its basic idea—that the continents had moved horizon-
tally on the Earth’s surface during the geological past. One support-
er was the meeting’s chairman, an influential Dutch oil geologist
named W. A. J. M. van Waterschoot van der Gracht (1873–1943).
Van der Gracht’s long introduction and conclusion speeches, both
defending continental drift, took up more than half the pages of

the book containing the printed version of the meeting’s papers.
He pointed out difficulties with the currently accepted theory that
the Earth had cooled and contracted and urged geologists to be
open to other possibilities. Chester Longwell of Yale University,
one of the attendees, said that he was not hostile to the idea of
continental movement but doubted much of Wegener’s evidence.
He commented
[The theory’s] daring and spectacular character appeals
to the imagination both of the layman and of the scientist.
But an idea that concerns so closely the most fundamental
principles of our science must have a sounder basis than
imaginative appeal.
Most of the meeting’s speakers, by contrast, strongly opposed
the continental drift theory. They reserved their harshest criticisms
for Wegener’s suggestions about the forces that had made the conti-
nents move. They agreed that pole-fleeing force and tidal drag both
existed. They doubted that these tiny forces could have shifted mas-
sive pieces of rock, however, no matter how much time they had had
in which to do so.
Harsh Criticisms
The scientists at the New York meeting did not question the exis-
tence of the sial and sima layers in the Earth’s crust, but they point-
ed out that researchers still had not agreed on the extent, nature,
and qualities of either layer. It was especially unclear whether the
sima acted more like a liquid or like a solid. Furthermore, retired
Stanford University geologist Bailey Willis (1857–1949) com-
plained, Wegener was trying to have it both ways: If the sima was
weak, or liquid, enough to allow the continents to plow through
it, how could it at the same time be strong enough to crumple the
continents’ leading edges into mountains? William Bowie of the
U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey (1872–1940), another eminent
Earth scientist who attended the meeting, similarly asked why, if
the sima was such a weak layer, the ocean floor could maintain the
Alfred Wegener
ridges and trenches that it was known to possess, rather than being
completely flat.
Other conference members brought up other questions.
Paleontologist Charles Schuchert (1856–1942) of Yale University
wondered why Pangaea had survived geological periods marked
by great unrest in the Earth’s crust, only to break up in a time
that was supposed to have been geologically quiet. J. W. Gregory
(1864–1932), an Australian geologist working in Britain, pointed out
that some similarities between animals and plants in western North
America and Asia were just as striking as those between Africa and
South America, yet a connection between those continents was not
part of Wegener’s scheme.
As Philip Lake and some of Wegener’s German critics had done
earlier, speakers at the 1926 meeting fired criticisms at every class of
evidence that Wegener had found so convincing. The geodetic mea-
surements of Greenland’s longitude—even the ones using radiotele-
graph time signals—were too inaccurate to show whether the island
was moving, they said. They made the same criticisms of Wegener’s
distorted outlines of the continents that Lake had done. Regarding
the supposed matches between rock formations and fossils on dif-
ferent continents, they accused Wegener of having picked out data
that fitted his theory while ignoring other equally well-documented
facts that did not.
Powerful Feelings
All these criticisms were important, several historians of science
who have written about the continental drift controversy say, but
they should not have been enough to make Earth scientists discard
Wegener’s theory entirely. It was true, as Wegener himself admitted,
that the causes for continental motion he chose were not very con-
vincing. However, he and others have pointed out, there were many
other times when scientists accepted the idea that something had hap-
pened—if the factual evidence was compelling enough—even when
they had little or no understanding of how or why it had happened.
For instance, as Naomi Oreskes writes in The Rejection of Continental
Drift, geologists accepted that huge folding or overthrusts had taken
place in the Alps, moving rocks for hundreds of miles, because the
evidence that this had occurred was overwhelming—even though
they had no idea how or why it had happened. Although most of the
criticisms of Wegener’s individual pieces of evidence (or his interpre-
tation of them) were justified, they were not strong enough to destroy
his whole theory, historians say. Why, then, was continental drift so
violently rejected?
The fact that the feelings of the scientists at the New York
meeting went beyond professional disagreement was shown in the
language that many of them used. They mocked not only the con-
tinental drift theory, but Wegener personally, in bitingly sarcastic
comments. Pierre Termier, the director of the Geological Survey
of France, damned Wegener with faint praise by saying that his
hypothesis was “a beautiful dream, the dream of a great poet. One
tries to embrace it, and finds that he has in his arms but a little
vapor or smoke; it is at the same time both alluring and intangible.”
Rollin T. Chamberlin of the University of Chicago put his opinion
more bluntly: “Wegener’s hypothesis . . . is of the foot-loose type . . .
that . . . takes considerable liberty with our globe and is less bound
by restrictions or tied down by awkward, ugly facts than most of its
rival theories.” (A few commentators of the time were blunter still.
The president of the American Philosophical Society called the drift
theory “Utter, damned rot.”)
The historians have debated why Wegener’s theory aroused
such powerful emotions. Part of the reason, some have said, was
that Wegener was an outsider. He was not a geologist, a geophysi-
cist, a paleontologist, or a geodesist—he was a meteorologist. Many
Earth scientists felt that he had no right to comment on subjects
outside his own field. For instance, Charles Schuchert said, “It is
wrong for a stranger to the facts he handles to generalize from
them to other generalizations.” Perhaps Wladimir Köppen had
feared this sort of reaction when, after Wegener had first described
continental drift to him in 1912, he told his future son-in-law to
stick to meteorology. The fact that Wegener was a national out-
sider as well—a German, with whose country the United States
had been at war less than a decade earlier—may have added to
American feelings against him.
Alfred Wegener
Different Approaches to Science

More fundamentally, several historians say, criticisms of Wegener
were stronger in the United States than in Europe because of basic
disagreements about the best way to do science. “Arguments [about
continental drift] were not just about facts but also theories, meth-
ods and aims,” H. E. LeGrand writes in Drifting Continents and
Shifting Theories. Europeans were comfortable with Wegener’s
approach of forming a tentative idea (working hypothesis) and then
seeking out factual evidence to support it—the so-called deductive
method. The fact that most of Wegener’s evidence did not come
from his own research also fitted within the European scientific tra-
dition. Scientists in the United States, on the other hand, believed
✹ Inductive and deductive reasoning

There are two commonly used methods of reasoning, or moving
between facts and possible explanations for those facts. Scientists,
like other humans, use both methods all the time. People often use
the methods alternately, in a sort of cycle moving from the unknown
to the known and back again.
Most commonly, scientists begin with inductive reasoning.
Inductive reasoning travels from particular facts or observations to
an explanation for those observations as a group. It moves from the
specific to the general—what has been called a bottom up approach.
For instance, suppose that, for several days in a row, one no-
tices that one’s cats gather in the kitchen around 5:00 P.M.—wheth-
er one is in the kitchen at that time or not. This behavior forms a
repeating pattern that one would like to explain. One remembers
that one usually feeds the cats in the kitchen at about that hour, so
one forms a hypothesis that the cats appear there because they
expect to be fed.
A hypothesis is an educated guess based on what is known. It
refers to specific facts and can be used to make predictions that
can be tested. For instance, one’s hypothesis about the cats might
lead one to predict that if one changes one’s pets’ feeding time, one
will also change the time that they arrive in the kitchen. One could
test this prediction by feeding the cats at 6:00 P.M. for a week and
strongly that the most important part of science was gathering data
through one’s own observations or experiments. Only after years of
field or laboratory work, they thought, should a researcher offer a
few tentative suggestions about the meaning of the facts that had
been collected.
Edward Berry (1875–1945), a professor of paleontology at Johns
Hopkins University who attended the New York meeting, summed
up this kind of complaint about Wegener’s scientific procedure in
the following words:
My principal objection to the Wegener hypothesis rests on the
author’s method. This, in my opinion, is not scientific, but
takes the familiar course of an initial idea, a selective search
then seeing whether they continue to come to the kitchen at 5:00 or

begin waiting until 6:00.
If the cats still appear at 5:00, one may need to modify the
hypothesis (or perhaps continue observing in case the change takes
longer than a week). If, on the other hand, one finds that the cats
alter their behavior to fit with the new feeding schedule, the observa-
tions support the hypothesis. If one makes a similar set of tests with
a dog and confirms the hypothesis that he goes to the front door at
8:00 A.M. each morning because he expects to be walked then, one
might combine these hypotheses into the broader theory that cats
and dogs can tell time. A theory is more general than a hypothesis
and is supported by a wider collection of observations.
If one considers the theory to be well supported, one might then
turn to deductive reasoning to explore this phenomenon further.
Deductive reasoning starts with a general statement and moves to
the specific—a top down approach. For example, starting with the
theory that cats and dogs can tell time, one might form the hypoth-
esis that if one rewards the cats or dog (say, with food or some
activity that they enjoy) at a particular time and place each day, one
will be able to train them to come to that place at that time. One can
then design an experiment that will show whether this hypothesis
holds true.
8 Alfred Wegener
through the literature for corroborative evidence, ignoring

most of the facts that are opposed to the idea, and ending in a
state of auto-intoxication in which the subjective idea comes
to be considered as an objective fact.
Wegener’s ideas also brought up the old disagreements that had
split geology in its youth as violently as mysterious forces had sup-
posedly broken up Pangaea. One of these was the rivalry between
catastrophism and uniformitarianism. Although Wegener did not
actually describe any ancient catastrophes, many researchers felt
that his theory implied them. Why else, they said, should Pangaea
have broken up relatively suddenly in a geologically quiet time?
In some American minds, too, H. E. LeGrand speculates,
Wegener’s theory may have stirred up painful memories of the even
deeper conflict between science and religion. Many scientists in the
19th century had associated catastrophism with belief in worldwide
disasters described in the Bible, particularly Noah’s Flood. Lyell’s
uniformitarianism, on the other hand, had come to be connected
with Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, because both were based
on the belief that “the present is the key to the past.” The present
seemed to echo the past just as much in the dispute between religion
and science as it was supposed to do in geology: Just a year before
the New York meeting, believers in a literal interpretation of the
Bible had put a Tennessee high school biology teacher John Scopes
(1900–70) on trial for violating a state law against teaching evolu-
tion. Wegener made no mention of religion in his writing, but some
scientists may have feared that accepting any idea that resembled
catastrophism might open the door to a renewed version of this
larger conflict as well.
Starting All Over

Perhaps the deepest reason for Wegener’s contemporary Earth
scientists’ violent rejection of continental drift, LeGrand and some
other historians say, is that if Wegener’s theory proved correct, it
would destroy ideas that many of these scientists had spent their
entire careers believing and studying. “We insist on testing this
hypothesis with exceptional severity, for its acceptance would
“Utter, damned rot” 9
necessitate the discarding of theories held so long that they have

become almost an integral part of our science,” Chester Longwell
said at the 1926 meeting. Or, as Rollin Chamberlin put it even more
bluntly, “If we are to believe Wegener’s hypothesis, we must forget
everything which has been learned [about Earth science] in the last
70 years and start all over again.”
Whatever the reasons for it, historians agree that the powerful
disapproval of Wegener’s hypothesis expressed at the New York
meeting in 1926 seriously damaged further consideration of con-
tinental drift, especially in the United States, for many decades.
Science historian Ursula B. Marvin writes in Continental Drift: The
Evolution of a Concept, “Partly as a result of that symposium, more
than 35 years were to pass before American geologists would meet
again for the purpose of seriously discussing continental drift.”
When Earth scientists’ thoughts finally did turn back to his drift
theory, Alfred Wegener was no longer alive to enjoy its revival.
Death on the Ice
A fter 1928, Alfred Wegener spent little time brooding about
his fellow scientists’ rejection of continental drift because
he had something more exciting on his mind: a chance to return
to Greenland. Johannes Georgi claimed in a memoir included in
Schwarzbach’s Alfred Wegener that the opportunity for this new
expedition came through him.
Georgi by this time had established a successful meteorological
career of his own with the Marine Observatory in Hamburg. In 1926
and 1927, while doing balloon studies in Iceland, he had discovered
the powerful high-altitude wind currents called the jet stream. He
wrote to Wegener in 1928, asking for advice about the possibility
of setting up a weather balloon station on the Greenland ice cap to
study these winds further. Wegener responded with enthusiasm,
0
death on the Ice
expanding Georgi’s limited proposal into what Georgi called “a com-

plete geophysical program.”
The German economy was facing many difficulties, including
massive inflation. Nonetheless, Georgi and Wegener persuaded the
Emergency Aid Committee for German Science to promise funding
for their expedition. Wegener explained that he planned for the trip
to last a year and a half, during which expedition members would
record daily air and ice temperatures and changes in the atmosphere
at several locations. He hoped to establish a station on the ice cap
itself and have men spend the winter there, which had never been
done before. Among other things, they could measure the thickness
of the ice cap by setting off explosions and measuring the waves that
the explosions sent through the ice. They would use seismographs,
the same tools used to measure natural earthquakes, to record the
effects of these artificial ones. The expedition could also test new
equipment for Arctic travel, such as motorized sledges.
The information his group gathered could help forecasters pre-
dict weather in northern Europe because that weather was strongly
affected by the weather over Greenland, Wegener told the commit-
tee. The expedition’s research would also benefit shipping in the
North Atlantic, which was at risk from floating icebergs that came
from the chilly island. It also might aid air travel between North
America and Europe, still in the planning stages, because the planes’
routes were likely to pass over Greenland.
Planning an Expedition
With the committee’s support, Wegener, Georgi, and two other
German scientists, Fritz Loewe (1895–1974) and Ernst Sorge (1899–
1946), made a preliminary journey to Greenland in March 1929.
Their chief task was to choose sites for the main expedition’s two
coastal base camps. The western camp needed to be near a spot on
the interior ice sheet that was close to the shore and not too steep
for dogs and sleds to climb. The group finally chose a location at the
head of a fjord, or narrow inlet, called Kamarujuk, inside Umanak
Bay. Wegener arranged with local Greenlanders to supply men, dogs,
Alfred Wegener
and dog food for the main expedition. The four men also made some
preliminary scientific observations, including the first measurement
of ice thickness using the seismic (explosion) method. They returned
to Germany in November.
This photograph of Alfred Wegener’s fellow polar explorers Johannes Georgi, Peter
Freuchen, and Ernst Sorge (left to right) was taken just before Wegener’s final expedition
to Greenland in 1930–1931. Georgi, Sorge, and Fritz Loewe spent the winter on the
Greenland ice cap at the expedition’s Mid-Ice station. (ullstein bild/The Granger Collection)
death on the Ice
Now came the work that might be harder than the expedition
itself: choosing the scientists to go on the main expedition and gath-
ering the many supplies that the group would need. The extensive
packing list covered not only food for men and animals (the group
planned to use both dogs and Icelandic ponies) but also kerosene fuel
for heating and cooking, warm clothing, radios, and scientific instru-
ments modified to function at subzero temperatures. It also included
two propeller-driven motorized sledges, built to order by an airplane
factory in Finland. Wegener hoped that these devices would travel
faster and carry heavier loads than dogs, but they had never been
tested under Arctic conditions.
Wegener, Georgi, and Sorge spent exhausting hours making
lists, checking with suppliers, interviewing applicants, and arguing
with the Emergency Committee and other agencies about funding.
Through it all, Georgi wrote later, Wegener managed to retain his
even temper and sense of humor, venting his frustrations only in the
pages of the diary he kept. “His extraordinary calmness, his willing-
ness to make sacrifices for the sake of his work, his affability, and his
sense of fairness made him an ideal expedition leader,” Wegener’s
father-in-law, Wladimir Köppen, wrote of him.
A Frustrating Start
At last, all the goods and equipment—amounting to 98 tons of mate-
rial, packed into 2,500 crates, boxes, bags, and barrels—were assem-
bled at Copenhagen and loaded onto the large Danish ship Disko.
Wegener and the 13 other scientists said good-bye to their tearful
families and departed on April 1, 1930. They stopped at Reykjavik,
Iceland, 10 days later to collect 25 Icelandic ponies and three men to
manage them. They then went on to Greenland, where they landed
on April 15. There they had to transfer their supplies to a smaller
ship, the Gustav Holm, which could move more easily among the
ice floes. Unfortunately, they found that most of the sea ice on the
northwestern coast had not yet broken up, so they could not reach
the fjord where they wanted to set up their first base, West Station.
They had to unload onto the ice near Uvkusigsat, a settlement on a
nearby fjord. The Gustav Holm left them there on May 10.
Alfred Wegener
Wegener’s expedition unloaded their supplies from this small ship, the Gustav Holm, onto
the ice in northwestern Greenland in early May 1930. Because the sea ice refused to
break up on schedule, however, they could not move on to the spot where they wanted
to establish West Station, their first base. This delay created hardship for the expedition
and was indirectly responsible for Wegener’s death. (Archive/Alfred Wegener Institute)
And then they waited . . . and waited . . . and waited. For 38

days beyond the time they hoped to start for the head of the fjord,
Wegener and his men could do nothing because the sea ice blocking
their path refused to melt. Even attempts to blast the ice loose with
dynamite did not help. This delay not only wasted food and other
supplies but cut into the limited time that the group would have
for establishing the Mid-Ice (Eismitte) station on the inner ice sheet
before winter made travel impossible. “Our expedition’s program
is slowly being seriously jeopardized by the obstinacy of the ice,”
Wegener wrote in his journal on June 9.
The ice finally broke up on June 17, letting the men begin at last
to haul their supplies up the Kamarujuk fjord in their tiny motor-
boat, the Krabbe. They then faced the task of dragging the boxes and
death on the Ice
bales up the steep side of the glacier to the nunatak, or stretch of

rocky, ice-free ground, where they planned to set up West Station.
They spent days—or rather, nights, lit by the glow of the summer’s
midnight Sun—chipping a path out of the ice for the load-carrying
ponies to use. Dogsleds transported the material over sections of
the glacier that were too steep for the ponies. The hardest work was
bringing up the two motor sledges, which were too heavy for either
dogs or ponies. They had to be dragged up the steepest part of the
glacier by hand-operated winches and cables.
Meanwhile, Walthar Kopp and the two other scientists who were
to establish the East Station left Copenhagen on July 10 and arrived
at the mouth of Scoresby Sound on July 19. They had to wait even
longer than the group in the west for the sea ice to melt and let them
proceed to their destination. They reached the East Station site only
on September 18, but they had their huts and weather station, includ-
ing facilities for launching tethered balloons, completed by October 1,
just in time for the first snowstorm of winter. They established radio
contact with West Station for the first time on November 28.
Setting up Mid-Ice
Setting up West Station was only the beginning. Wegener’s men
still had to establish the Mid-Ice station, 250 miles (400 km) farther
inland, in the center of the ice cap itself. The first trip from West
Station to the site of Mid-Ice began on July 15, much later than
Wegener had hoped. The motor sledges were still being assembled
and tested, so dogs had to do the work.
Each round trip between West Station and Mid-Ice was expected
to take a minimum of three weeks. Wegener calculated that trans-
porting the 7,000 pounds (3,200 kg) of food, kerosene, and other sup-
plies that the inner station needed would take at least six such trips
with their present number of dogs and sleds. They would not have
time to make that many journeys before winter, so they would have
to hire more dogsled teams from the local Greenlanders.
Not surprisingly, the first journey across the ice cap was a great
challenge. Johannes Georgi, who would be the chief scientist at Mid-
Ice, led the trip. Two other scientists, Fritz Loewe and Karl Weiken,
Alfred Wegener
and eight Greenlanders went with him. As they moved inland, the
men set up caches of food, kerosene, and other essential supplies for
groups traveling between West Station and Mid-Ice to draw upon.
They marked the path by placing a black flag on a pole every third of
a mile (500 m) and building a cairn, or stack of rocks and snow, every
three miles (5 km). These landmarks could be lifesavers in a blizzard,
when straying from the trail would mean certain death.
The men and dogs had to climb from an altitude of 3,000 feet
(915 m) at West Station to 9,850 feet (3,003 m) at Mid-Ice, and the
decrease in oxygen as they ascended made them tire easily. The
Greenlanders grew nervous about remaining on the forbidding ice
cap, where they did not usually travel, and began insisting on return-
ing to the shore. Finally, at the halfway point, Loewe agreed to go
back with five of the Greenlanders, leaving only three to go on with
Georgi and Weiken. Fewer people meant fewer sleds, so much of the
equipment intended for Mid-Ice had to be left at that spot.
The five men finally reached the Mid-Ice site on July 30. After
unloading the limited supplies they had brought, all except Georgi
headed back to West Station the following day. Georgi remained
at Mid-Ice to set up the station and begin recording weather data.
He emerged from his tent each morning to measure temperature,
wind, humidity, and atmospheric pressure. During the day he
tinkered with the instruments he had brought, trying to persuade
them to function at the temperatures he found on the ice cap,
which could drop to -20°F (-29°C) at night. He also dug a chamber
in the ice to provide better shelter for himself and his instruments
than the tent.
By the end of August, Wegener’s men had hauled all the expe-
dition’s supplies up the glacier to West Station and made a second
trip to Mid-Ice. Summer was nearly over, however, and Mid-Ice
was still far from self-sufficient. “I’m afraid, really afraid, that we’re
not going to make it,” Wegener had written in his journal as early
as August 6.
The motorized sledges proved to be a great disappointment.
Dubbed Polar Bear (Eisbär) and Snow Sparrow (Schneespatz), they
were finally ready for testing on August 29. The group found that the
sledges’ motors were too weak to haul heavy loads except in the best
of weather, and even then they moved more slowly than Wegener
death on the Ice
had hoped. The temperamental devices could not handle steep

slopes, opposing winds, wet snow, or unusually low temperatures.
A third dogsled party reached Mid-Ice on September 13. Georgi,
now accompanied by Ernst Sorge, was well settled in, but the two
men still needed more fuel, food, and explosives for their ice depth
measurements. Georgi sent back a letter to Wegener with the
returning sleds, saying that if they did not receive another shipment
by October 20, he and Sorge would try to return to West Station
because they would not have enough supplies at Mid-Ice to survive
the winter.
Meanwhile, a crew attempting to bring the loaded motor sledges
to Mid-Ice had left West Station a few days after the dogsled group.
The motor team met the returning sled team at the halfway marker
on September 17. To add to the motor crew’s troubles, winter
seemed to be starting early, and one storm after another slowed their
progress. After a week, they finally had to admit that the sledges
would never reach Mid-Ice. They turned back, only to have the
engines of both sledges overheat. The men left the useless vehicles
in the snow and traveled the rest of the way on foot, finally arriving
on September 27.
Journeys to the Wegener expedition’s Mid-Ice station had to use dogsleds like these.
Wegener had brought two motorized sledges that were supposed to be able to carry
large loads, but they refused to function properly in the ice cap’s challenging environment.
(The Granger Collection)
8 Alfred Wegener
✹ International Polar year:

a modern Polar adventure
Scientists today are just as drawn to the lands around the Earth’s
poles—the Arctic and Antarctic—as Alfred Wegener was. “We now
know that these areas hold some of the keys that wind the world,”
Martin Varley wrote in the March 2007 issue of Geographical, the
official magazine of Britain’s Royal Geographical Society. Today,
the subject of much of these scientists’ research is an issue that
Wegener never heard of: global warming.
One of the largest polar ventures of the early 21st century
is the International Polar Year (IPY), a program organized by the
International Council for Science and the World Meteorological Or-
ganization. IPY involves 211 projects, staffed by more than 50,000
scientists and support people from many fields and more than 60
countries. The program runs from March 2007 to March 2009. Its
projects focus on eight topic areas: Earth, land, people, ocean, ice,
atmosphere, space, and education.
One of IPY’s greatest concerns is the changes in snow and ice
that have been reported in connection with global warming. If ice
sheets such as the one covering Greenland were to melt, the extra
water could raise sea levels enough to threaten coastal cities and
low-lying areas around the world. At the same time, decreases in
snowfall and shrinking of glaciers could cause shortages of fresh-
water. More than half of IPY’s projects are related to global warming
and related climate changes.
IPY researchers also hope to advance basic science, just as Alfred
Wegener did. They seek clues to Earth’s past climates that may be
buried in ice cores, for instance. The Greenland ice sheet is one of
the areas that will be cored. Another project will combine data from
satellite radar and multi-beam sonar scanners carried beneath ships to
study past and present changes in the deep seafloor. Some of these
changes are related to the movement of the planet’s landmasses.
IPY scientists draw on equipment that Alfred Wegener could
hardly have imagined. In addition to satellites and sonar, they have
fleets of icebreaker ships and automated gliders that carry instru-
ments, for instance. At the same time, they use traditional Arctic
exploration gear that Wegener knew well, such as dogs and sleds.
Although modern communication and the possibility of quick air
rescue make IPY scientists far safer than Wegener and his men
were, they must still experience the isolation, danger, and beauty
that characterize these forbidding lands.
death on the Ice 9
Visiting Mid-Ice
As they neared West Station, the unhappy motor team, in turn, met
Wegener and Fritz Loewe, who were leading a fourth dogsled trip to
Mid-Ice with 13 Greenlanders and 15 sleds. Even before Wegener
had seen Georgi’s letter, he had decided that a final supply run to
Mid-Ice was essential. He knew it would need to set out as soon as
possible, before winter blocked the path completely. His team had
left West Station on September 22, the day after the third party
brought back the sleds and dogs they needed. Now, after hearing
the sad story of the motor sledges, Wegener’s group cached some of
the supplies they had been carrying and instead packed up the most
important items that had been in the sledge loads.
They did not get far. The Greenlanders in Wegener’s party were
used to chilly weather, of course, but their reindeer-skin clothing
was not warm enough to keep
out the degree of cold they now
faced. They therefore insisted on
turning back. Even Wegener’s
personal appeal and a promise
of higher pay persuaded only
four to remain, reducing the
group to six sleds. After caching
many items and repacking the
rest, the tiny band continued
on to Mid-Ice on September 29.
They carried only about 4,000
pounds (1,800 kg) of supplies,
far less than they had hoped.
As the days wore on, bad
weather made three of the four
remaining Greenlanders aban- Alfred Wegener’s honesty, loyalty, and sense
don the journey. Only one, a of fairness made the members of his ex-
young man named Rasmus pedition respect him as a leader. Wegener,
in turn, was devoted to the expedition and
Villumsen, was willing to con- its scientific work. He saw that work as a
tinue with Wegener and Loewe. “sacred trust,” worthy of “the greatest sac-
rifices.” He ultimately sacrificed his life to its
The load for Mid-Ice therefore success. (Archive/Alfred Wegener Institute)
80 Alfred Wegener
had to be cut yet again as the six sleds became three. Georgi’s dead-
line passed, and Wegener had to hope that, if Georgi and Sorge
had indeed left Mid-Ice, the two groups would meet on the trail.
Continual blizzards and lack of food sapped the strength of men and
dogs, and some of the weaker dogs had to be killed to make food for
the rest. To add to their problems, Loewe told Wegener that his toes
had become numb, a sign of frostbite. Wegener massaged Loewe’s
feet every night and morning in camp, hoping to restore circulation
to them before the frozen flesh died and began to decay, but his
efforts failed.
Wegener, Loewe, and Villumsen finally reached Mid-Ice on
October 30. The temperature outside was down to -62°F (-52°C).
They were thrilled to find that the station was not deserted: Georgi
and Sorge, equally delighted to hear the sound of their sleds, rushed
out of the ice cave in their underwear to greet them. As Georgi
explained, he had concluded that trying to reach West Station on
foot through the winter storms would be more risky than staying
where they were, so the two had decided not to leave after all. He was
bitterly disappointed at how little the men had been able to bring.
Still, he calculated that if he and Sorge were very careful they might
have enough fuel and food to see them through the winter.
Wegener, on the other hand, was excited to see how much
Georgi and Sorge had accomplished. “You are comfortable here!
You are comfortable!” he kept exclaiming. The ice cave, which
the two men had completed on October 5, was a mere 23°F (-5°C)
inside, cozy compared with the outside temperature. Lit by day-
light that the icy roof filtered to a dim blue, the cave included a rel-
atively large room (10 by 16 feet, or 3 by 5 m) with sleeping ledges
and several smaller rooms for storage and other functions. The
station also had an observation tower that reached 10 feet (3 m)
above the surface.
Wegener was thrilled that Georgi and Sorge had decided to con-
tinue their scientific work at Mid-Ice through the winter in spite of
the difficulties that their limited supplies would cause. Georgi later
remembered him saying, “The fact that you [will] have spent the
winter here in the middle of Greenland, even without any particular
death on the Ice 8
Johannes Georgi and Ernst Sorge (later joined by Fritz Loewe) made themselves relative-
ly comfortable at the expedition’s Mid-Ice (Eismitte) station, shown here. The entrance
to the station is left of center. In the center is the tower, made of blocks of ice. The
wooden structure on the right contained weather instruments. To keep warm, the men
spent much of their time in a cave hollowed into the ice. (Archive/Alfred Wegener Institute)
results in research, doing only the simplest and most routine mea-
suring, is . . . worth all that has gone into the expedition.”
Final Journey
The men quickly realized that their provisions, scanty as they already
were for two, would have to stretch to cover three: Fritz Loewe could
not possibly make the return journey on his frostbitten feet. Almost
all of Loewe’s toes had already turned black with gangrene. If they
were not amputated soon, the infection in the dying tissue could
spread into the rest of his feet or even his whole body. Georgi finally
cut off Loewe’s toes with a pocket knife in mid-November. As he
wrote later, he had to manage the operation with “no knowledge of
medicine, no book with instructions for this kind of problem, no sur-
gical instruments, no anesthetic, [and] a minimal supply of bandages
8 Alfred Wegener
and disinfectant.” Fortunately, the same cold that had cost Loewe his
toes in the first place helped to keep the gangrene from spreading,
and his wounds healed cleanly.
This photo of Alfred Wegener and Greenlander Rasmus Villumsen was taken at Mid-Ice
on November 1, 1930, Wegener’s 50th birthday, just before the two men left the
station to attempt to return to the West Station. Wegener died about a day later,
probably from a heart attack. Villumsen buried his leader’s body and continued on;
his own body was never found. (Archive/Alfred Wegener Institute)
death on the Ice 8
Mid-Ice’s supplies could not possibly support five people, so the

group agreed that Wegener and Villumsen would have to chance
returning to West Station. In order to survive on what they could
carry, they planned to begin with two sleds but then kill dogs as they
weakened and use them as food. When they had dogs enough for
only one sled, Villumsen would drive the sled and Wegener would
follow behind on his skis.
After celebrating Wegener’s 50th birthday with some dried fruit
and chocolate that they had saved for a special occasion, the men
parted on November 1. As Georgi, Sorge, and Loewe waved good-
bye to the two departing dogsleds, Georgi was comforted by the fact
that, although Wegener was no longer in his youth, he was in excel-
lent physical condition. He seemed almost as strong as the younger
Villumsen. Villumsen, for his part, had grown into an experienced
and courageous Arctic traveler. If anyone could make this perilous
journey successfully, it would surely be these two. The weather, too,
seemed promising. Still, Georgi wrote later, he was worried enough
about his friend that “after the two sleds disappeared into the fog, I
retired to the barometer room to compose myself.”
He was right to worry. No one ever saw the two men alive again.
A Long Winter
Cut off from all outside communication (a radio was one of the
many items destined for Mid-Ice that had been abandoned along
the way), the three men at Mid-Ice endured the winter as best they
could. They spent as much time as possible in their sleeping bags
in order to keep warm and save fuel. Their usual meals were bread
and oat porridge in the morning and canned or dried meat in the
evening, with treats such as frozen whale meat and an apple or
orange on special occasions. Each day they made their measure-
ments, adjusted and repaired their instruments, took and developed
photographs, and fought off the depression of the endless winter
night. Sometimes, at least, the depression was offset by beauty, as
Georgi wrote:
An hour ago I took a walk outside. The full moon in the eastern
sky, burnished silver, seeming to smile scornfully at the northern
8 Alfred Wegener
lights which cast several broad curves from east to south, but
whose pale light was faint compared to the moonshine.
As I walked along in -55° Celsius [-63° Fahrenheit] the
surface of the snow groaned and creaked with every step, and
now and again the sharp sound of a little snowquake caused
by the walking—the subsidence of the uppermost strata of
the snow—was audible far around. My breath formed thick
clouds. . . . The whole effect was indescribable. Nature here is so
completely alone, and pays no attention to us tiny intruders.
Life at West Station was less grim but in some ways even more
depressing. Several of the men there went out to look for Wegener
and Loewe in mid-November, just as the winterlong Arctic night was
✹ a memorial to wegener:
The alfred wegener Institute
Alfred Wegener was honored in several ways after his death. The city
of Graz, for instance, changed the name of Blumengasse (Flower
Way), the street on which the Wegener family had lived, to Wegener-
gasse. The International Astronomical Union named a crater on the
dark side of the Moon after Wegener in 1970. The memorial that
probably would have pleased Wegener the most, however, is the
Alfred Wegener Institute, located in Bremerhaven, Germany. Founded
in 1980, the institute carries out polar and oceanic research in the
Arctic and Antarctic as well as in temperate latitudes. The German
ministry of education and research provides most of its funding.
One of the Wegener Institute’s missions is to improve under-
standing of interactions among the oceans, ice, and the atmo-
sphere. It also works to improve knowledge of the animals and
plants of the Arctic and Antarctic and to learn more about the way
the polar continents and seas have evolved over time. One focus
of its research today is the role that the polar regions play in the
world’s climate, especially in relation to global warming. The institute
carries out some of its studies on its research ship, the Polarstern
(Pole Star). The institute also has an archive of photographs and
other material related to Alfred Wegener’s life and work, especially
his expeditions to Greenland.
death on the Ice 8
beginning, but they found no sign of them and finally had to return
to the station on December 5. They clung to the hope that all the
men had simply remained at Mid-Ice for the winter. As spring came
without any word, however, they became more and more sure that
the worst had happened.
Grim Discovery
West Station could not send another expedition to Mid-Ice until
April 23, 1931. On its way across the glacier, about halfway to Mid-
Ice, the team passed a disturbing sight: Wegener’s skis and ski pole,
carefully upended and standing like sentinels in the snow. Anxious
to go on, the group did not investigate further at that time.
A second group manning the motor sledges, now functional
once more, caught up with the dogsled party around May 5 and then
passed them, arriving at Mid-Ice on May 7. After the first enthusi-
astic greetings, Kraus (the leader of the rescue expedition) and Ernst
Sorge blurted out at the same time, “Where’s Wegener?” In the
ensuing silence, both men knew what the answer had to be. Kraus,
who had brought a radio, sent the sad news to Godhavn, a large
Greenland settlement. Godhavn, in turn, relayed it to Germany.
Georgi remained behind at Mid-Ice, where he planned to con-
tinue making weather recordings until midsummer so that the
expedition would have a full year of measurements on the ice cap.
Loewe, still in poor health, returned to West Station with the motor
sledge party. Sorge and the dogsled team, meanwhile, returned to the
upended skis, the meaning of which they now guessed.
On May 8, digging below the skis, the group found Wegener’s
body buried in the ice. He had been carefully wrapped in two sleep-
ing bag covers and laid on a sleeping bag and a reindeer skin. Karl
Weiken, a member of the party, wrote that Wegener’s face appeared
“relaxed, peaceful, almost smiling” and “looked more youthful than
it had before.” Signs on the body suggested that Wegener had not
frozen or starved but had died quietly in his tent, probably from a
heart attack brought on by overexertion. Clearly Rasmus Villumsen
had still been with him when he died and had done everything he
could to bury the expedition leader with the respect he deserved.
8 Alfred Wegener
The expedition members marked Wegener’s grave with a crude cross made from his
broken ski pole. Wegener’s brother, Kurt, later erected a larger cross, but all signs
of Wegener’s grave and its markers have long since vanished beneath the ice.
(Archive/Alfred Wegener Institute)
“It was touching to see the care with which [Villumsen] had buried
Wegener; and one had to admire the pains he had taken to dig and
mark the grave,” Weiken wrote. The men returned Wegener’s body
to its icy grave and marked it with a large cairn of ice blocks, a cross
made from Wegener’s broken ski pole, and a black flag.
The last volume of the diary Wegener always kept and certain
other personal effects were not with his body. The team concluded
that Rasmus Villumsen must have taken them with him and pushed on
in an attempt to reach West Station. They searched diligently for the
Inuit’s body and found several places where he had camped. Villumsen
and the documents he carried, however, were never found.
Like Georgi at Mid-Ice, the men at West Station remained at
their posts, continuing the work that they had come to accomplish.
(The East Station crew had already finished their tasks and closed up
death on the Ice 8
This map of Greenland and nearby Iceland shows the routes of Alfred Wegener’s three
expeditions, as well as those of a few of the chilly island’s other explorers.
88 Alfred Wegener
the station on May 10.) They were sure that Alfred Wegener would
have wanted it that way. As Wegener had written to Georgi when the
expedition was being set up in 1930, “Whatever happens, the cause
[of the expedition and its scientific work] must not suffer in any way.
It is our sacred trust, it binds us together, it must go on under all
circumstances, even with the greatest sacrifices. That is, if you like,
my expedition religion.”
Kurt Wegener arrived in July to take over the leadership of the
expedition, as Alfred had arranged before the group’s departure. With
his help, the men collected Georgi from Mid-Ice on August 7, closed
up West Station, and sailed for home shortly afterward. Before they
left, Kurt arranged for a 20-foot (6-m) high cross to be made of iron
rods and placed over Alfred’s grave. Snow and ice covered over even
this monument as the decades passed. Today, all signs of Wegener’s
last resting place have long since vanished beneath the ice.
Rumblings of Change
W hen word of Alfred Wegener’s death reached Europe, he

was honored as a pioneer meteorologist and Arctic explorer.
Heinrich von Ficker, a scientific colleague, called him a “Viking of
science” in a memorial essay, for instance. For several decades, how-
ever, Wegener’s role as the father of continental drift theory—and
the theory itself—were all but forgotten.
Nonetheless, even during the years of the worst attacks on it,
Wegener’s theory had a few influential friends in the Earth science
community. They kept its memory alive during the 1930s, 1940s,
and 1950s. They also made it more acceptable to their fellow scien-
tists by finding more evidence to support it and making changes in
the theory’s weakest points.
89
90 Alfred Wegener
New Mechanisms for Drift

Reginald A. Daly (1871–1957), a highly regarded geology professor
at Harvard University, became convinced that the continents might
have moved after a trip to South Africa in 1922. During this visit
he saw the rock formations that Alfred Wegener had claimed were
so similar to those in South America, and he began to believe that
Wegener’s ideas might have merit. (Although Wegener’s book had
not yet been translated into English, Daly knew about the ideas in it
because English reviews of it had appeared.)
Daly described his thoughts on continental movement in Our
Mobile Earth, a book published in 1926. He proposed a different
mechanism for the movement than Wegener did. Daly thought that
the layer beneath the Earth’s solid crust was a glasslike material,
rigid in response to short-term stresses but yielding when acted on
by small, long-term ones. Borrowing words coined earlier by Yale
geology professor Joseph Barrell (1869–1919), Daly called this lower
layer the asthenosphere, or “sphere of weakness,” and the upper layer
the lithosphere, or “sphere of stone.” (Both of these terms are still
used, although they are defined somewhat differently from the way
Barrell and Daly used them.) The lithosphere was heavier or denser
than the asthenosphere, Daly said. When the contraction of the Earth
produced breaks in the crust, therefore, gravity would pull blocks of
lithosphere down into the softer layer. This shift could move other
nearby parts of the crust as well. Daly believed that portions of the
crust also might move horizontally because the Earth bulged at the
equator and the polar regions and dipped in between. Gravity would
make landmasses slide toward this depression.
In Britain, continental drift’s greatest defender was Arthur
Holmes (1890–1965), a professor of geology at the University of
Durham and, later, Edinburgh University. Holmes was best known as
one of the pioneers who had developed techniques for using radioac-
tive decay to determine the age of the Earth. Holmes in fact rejected
several aspects of Wegener’s version of continental drift and the
evidence Wegener had chosen to support it. He noted, however, that
“proving Wegener to be wrong is by no means equivalent to dispos-
ing of continental drift.”
rumblings of Change 9
Holmes’s greatest contribution to drift theory was to suggest

a possible force for moving the continents that geologists could
not immediately reject: convection currents in the sima or mantle.
(Two Austrian geologists, Otto Ampferer [1875–1947] and Robert
Schwinner [1878–1953], had mentioned the possibility of such
currents in the first decade of the century, but their ideas had not
been widely accepted.) Holmes first wrote about this idea in the late
1920s, and Wegener cited Holmes’s work in the 1929 edition of his
own book. Holmes described his convection current theory more
fully in “Radioactivity and Earth Movements,” a 1930 article in the
Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, and in an influen-
tial textbook Principles of Physical Geology, which was first published
in 1944.
According to Holmes, the breakdown of radioactive elements in
the sima produced heat that radiated out through the relatively thin,
In a 1929 article, Arthur Holmes suggested that convection currents in the Earth’s
mantle might be able to move the continents in the way that Alfred Wegener had
suggested. Harry Hess would later adapt some of Holmes’s ideas in his own theory
of seafloor spreading.
9 Alfred Wegener
cold ocean floors but built up under the heavier continents. The
temperature under the continents also was likely to be higher than
under the ocean because the granite-type rocks that make up the
continents contain more radioactive material than basalt-type ocean
rocks. Because of these differences, convection currents would rise
under the continents and sink under the ocean floors. At the spots
where the currents rose and spread, they would push the crust apart
and eventually tear it. As the currents turned downward, on the
other hand, they would compress the edges of blocks of crust, creat-
ing high pressure and high temperature that turned the crust’s rock
into a denser type. Gravity would make this rock sink down into the
mantle layer.
Holmes’s emphasis on convection currents was not his only dif-
ference with Wegener’s version of continental drift. Unlike Wegener,
Holmes did not picture the continents ploughing actively through
the sima like icebergs pushing through the sea. Rather, Holmes said
that they simply rode along with the rest of the crust as the sima itself
moved, carrying the crust with it. The Earth’s rotation, he thought,
would make upward-moving convection currents turn west and
downward-moving currents turn east.
Support from South Africa

Drift’s other greatest defender was South African geologist
Alexander du Toit (1878–1948), whom Reginald Daly called “the
world’s greatest field geologist.” Du Toit was an expert on the
rocks of his native country, including the Karoo formation, whose
similarities to rocks of the same age in other parts of the world had
made Eduard Suess think of the protocontinent Gondwanaland.
Wegener cited these similarities as a major support for his theory
in later editions of his book.
After seeing the Karoo formation and meeting du Toit in 1922,
Reginald Daly and Frederick E. Wright (1877–1953), a geologist at
the Carnegie Institution of Washington, proposed that the institu-
tion send du Toit to South America to examine the formations that
Wegener had claimed were so much like the South African ones. Du
Toit spent five months in Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina in 1923

and found the similarities just as great as Wegener had said. He
described his South American trip in a 1927 book called A Geological
Comparison of South America with South Africa. In this book, he
wrote of rocks he had seen in Brazil
Anyone who knows southern Africa will find the geology of
this landscape startling. At every step I was reminded of the
formations of Namaland and the Transvaal [parts of South
Africa]. The Brazilian strata [layers of sedimentary rock]
correspond perfectly in every detail to the strata series of the
southern African shield.
Du Toit was one of the most outspoken supporters of the con-
tinental drift theory after Wegener’s death, although he did not
describe it in quite the same way that Wegener had. For instance,
instead of a single protocontinent, Pangaea, du Toit proposed
two: Laurasia in the Northern Hemisphere and Gondwanaland
in the Southern. Du Toit described his version of drift most fully
in Our Wandering Continents: An Hypothesis of Continental
Drifting, which appeared in 1937. Like Holmes, du Toit believed
that convection currents in the mantle, produced by the heat that
radioactive decay generated, moved the slabs of crust on which the
continents rode.
In A Revolution in the Earth Sciences, an account of the conti-
nental drift controversy, science historian Anthony Hallam wrote,
“Du Toit unquestionably made a substantial contribution to the
drift hypothesis, partly by eliminating some of Wegener’s errors and
partly by integrating a vast amount of evidence, much of it new, into
a plausible story whereby a wide array of disparate facts was given
a coherent, simple interpretation.” Unfortunately for drift theory,
however, du Toit, like Wegener, did not pretend to be an objective
reporter. He defended the theory in a writing style even more pas-
sionate than Wegener’s and just as full of sarcasm as those of the
critical scientists at the 1926 symposium. Even though du Toit’s col-
leagues respected his geological fieldwork, many of them thought his
writings about drift were too emotional to be truly scientific.
9 Alfred Wegener
Comic Relief
The writings of Daly, Holmes, and du Toit improved some Earth
scientists’ opinions of continental drift in the 1930s and beyond,
but many of those who had criticized the theory in the 1920s still
rejected it. In 1944, for instance, Bailey Willis, who had objected
to Wegener’s ideas at the 1926 New York meeting, called the drift
theory a “fairy tale.”
Willis proposed a new version of the land-bridge idea in 1932 as
an alternative to drift. He suggested that mountain-building forces
beneath the ocean basins deform not only continental borders but
the basins themselves, producing the mid-ocean ridges. These
undersea mountain ranges continue onto the continents, from
time to time forming what Willis called “isthmian links” between
them. Ursula Marvin writes in Continental Drift: The Evolution of a
Concept, “To many scientists Willis’ isthmian links were the perfect
compromise between the doctrine of permanence and the Suessian
idea of submerged continents. . . . They seemed to remove all need
for continental drift.” Willis’s theory became very popular in the
1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, especially in the United States.
Interest in the drift theory also remained low because evidence
against it continued to emerge. For instance, new measurements by
a group of British and Danish scientists in 1936 showed that the ear-
lier determinations of longitude in Greenland, which had impressed
Wegener so much, were in error. The revised figures showed no sign
that the island was moving west, as Wegener had claimed.
Continental drift was not completely forgotten during this
period. Most geology textbooks described it, at least briefly, as one
of a number of theories about what might have happened to the
Earth’s crust during past geological eras. Professors mentioned it in
their college classes, too, but often only as comic relief. For instance,
Percy E. Raymond, a professor of paleontology at Harvard, liked to
tell his students that half of a fossil sea creature had been found in
Newfoundland and another half in Ireland. The two parts matched so
perfectly, Raymond said, that they had to belong to the same animal,
which had been “wrenched apart by Wegener’s hypothesis in the late
Pleistocene.” When scientists considered drift at all, they thought of
it in the revised versions offered by researchers like Holmes, not in

the form in which Wegener had originally presented it.
Dragging Gravity
While most Earth scientists were ignoring or making fun of conti-
nental drift, a few were making discoveries that would bring atten-
tion back to this half-forgotten theory. Most of these findings were
from the deep sea, a part of the Earth about which scientists knew
next to nothing in Wegener’s day. A few oceanic research expedi-
tions, such as the ones carried on the British ship Challenger in
1872 and the German ship Meteor in the mid–1920s, had dropped
dredging buckets down to bring up samples of material from differ-
ent parts of the ocean floors. They had also conducted soundings,
or depth measurements, with weights lowered on the ends of ropes.
The information that could be revealed in these ways, however, was
very limited.
Some of the new discoveries came from measurements of grav-
ity, the same kind of study that had led to the theory of isostasy. By
the early 20th century, researchers could measure local gravitational
fields with a device called a gravimeter, which was far more accurate
and easier to use than George Everest’s plumb bob.
Dutch geophysicist Felix A. Vening Meinesz (1887–1966) invent-
ed a gravimeter that could be used at sea and tested it on a Dutch
submarine in the Pacific Ocean near Indonesia in 1923. He found
lower-than-normal gravity values over the deep-sea trenches in the
area. This could mean, he said, that convection currents at these
spots were dragging lightweight oceanic crust down into the denser
layer below.
Vening Meinesz’s measurements were one of the first signs that
parts of the Earth’s crust not only might have moved in the distant
geological past but were still moving in the present day. He found
similar results in an expedition to the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico
in 1928 and in returns to Indonesia in 1932 and 1936. His find-
ings suggested that the seafloor crust near the trenches was being
squeezed or compressed horizontally, perhaps because two convec-
tion cells (circles of rising and falling currents) were colliding there.
9 Alfred Wegener
This stress, Vening Meinesz and his coworkers thought, had created
the Indonesian islands and was responsible for the earthquakes and
volcanoes so common in the region. Their results suggested that the
crust under the oceans was fairly strong, but the layer beneath it was
weak. This pattern fitted better with the Airy model of isostasy—the
one Alfred Wegener preferred—than with the Pratt model.
Artificial Earthquakes
Researchers in the 1930s also began applying to the deep sea the
same technique by which Wegener’s 1930 expedition had measured
the thickness of Greenland’s ice: setting off explosions to create
artificial earthquakes and measuring the resulting shock waves with
seismographs. Scientists dropped explosive charges from ships, then
William Maurice (“Doc”) Ewing was an expert on undersea echo sounding and seis-
mology. He founded the Lamont Earth Observatory for Columbia University in 1949.
Unlike some other Lamont researchers, he resisted the idea that the continental drift
theory might be true until the evidence became overwhelming in the mid-1960s.
(AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives)
detected the echoes of the blasts with hydrophones. The powerful

sound waves from the explosions went through the ocean floor and
bounced off the rock layers beneath, allowing researchers to measure
the thickness of the crust and the sediment that covered it. This seis-
mic technique also helped them find out what kinds of rocks made
up the crust at particular spots.
Maurice Ewing (1906–74), then at Lehigh University in Bethlehem,
Pennsylvania, pioneered undersea seismology in the 1930s. He
found, as Wegener had suggested, that the layer of continent-like,
or sialic, rocks on the ocean floor was very thin. In some places it
did not appear to exist at all. Most of the ocean floor, instead, was
made of basalt-type rocks. The crust on the seafloor was only about
3.7 miles (6 km) thick, whereas the continental crust was more than
24.9 miles (40 km) thick. Ewing also discovered that the layer of sedi-
ment over the seafloor rocks was much thinner than expected. This
suggested that the ocean floors were young—200 million years old or
less. Evidence from fossils and radioactive dating of rocks confirmed
this result.
War Spurs Marine Science

Because of submarine warfare, the navies of several countries,
especially the United States, became very interested in the deep sea
during World War II. Their interest continued in the 1950s during
the cold war, an intense rivalry between the United States and the
Soviet Union. The result was a tremendous upswing in deep-sea
research and technology. In the United States, the navy’s Office
of Naval Research, founded in 1946, and the federal government’s
National Science Foundation, founded in 1950, paid for most of
these marine science projects. Three academic facilities carried out
the bulk of them: the University of California’s Scripps Institution of
Oceanography in La Jolla; the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
in Woods Hole, Massachusetts; and Columbia University’s Lamont
Geological Observatory (later Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory,
now part of the Earth Institute) in New York.
William Menard, a marine geologist at Scripps, described the
explosion in knowledge of the deep sea during that era this way:
98 Alfred Wegener
By 1956 Lamont, using Navy submarines, had tripled the

number of gravity observations at sea. . . . There were perhaps
100 cores of sediment from deep-ocean basins in 1948. By
1956 Lamont had taken 1,195. . . . By 1962 Scripps had about
✹ scripps, woods hole, and lamont:

Three Pioneering Institutions
Of the three institutions that provided most of the research that
changed scientists’ views of the Earth’s history, the Scripps Institu-
tion of Oceanography was founded first. Funded partly by the family
of E. W. Scripps, a wealthy newspaper owner, it began as the
Marine Biological Association of San Diego in 1903. It became part
of the University of California in 1912 and was renamed the Scripps
Institution for Biological Research. According to the Scripps Web
site, it was the first permanent marine science facility in the Western
Hemisphere. It took on its present name in 1925. Scripps research
in the 1940s and 1950s included studies of sonar, the ecology
of kelp (giant seaweed) beds, and the discovery of the Mid-Pacific
Ridge, part of the mid-ocean ridge.
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, founded in 1930, is
part of the Marine Biological Laboratory, which has existed in
Woods Hole, Massachusetts, since 1888. Much of the money
to build the institution came from the Rockefeller Foundation. It
expanded greatly in the 1940s and 1950s and became a leader
in oceanographic research on the East Coast, as Scripps was on
the west. It did pioneering research in seismology, geophysics,
and meteorology as applied to the oceans. The Office of Naval Re-
search and, later, the National Science Foundation funded much of
its research. Its fleet of research vessels has included the famous
submersible Alvin.
The Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory is part of Columbia
University. Maurice Ewing founded it as the Lamont Geological Ob-
servatory in 1949 in a Hudson River mansion donated by the widow
of Thomas W. Lamont, a New York banker. It was renamed the
Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory in 1969 and took its pres-
ent name in 1993. Its specialty has been mapping the ocean floors,
including studies of their gravity, magnetism, and seismology. It has
huge collections of echo sounder and seismic tracings, cores, and
dredge samples from the seafloor. It is also known for its analysis of
undersea rocks and studies of ocean water and currents.
1,000. There had not been seismic stations in the deep sea,
and by 1965 there were hundreds. . . . The number of deep-sea
soundings had increased by about 108 [100,000,000 times] . . . .
Nothing comparable to shipboard magnetic profiles had ever
been known, [but then] Lamont and Scripps . . . towed magne-
tometers for hundreds of thousands of kilometers. . . . Even in
1964 I was only half jesting when I wrote of a “digression from
the familiar ocean basins to the mysterious continents.”
One of the devices used in the postwar marine science explosion,
the echo sounder, had been used first in an earlier war: World War
I. The sounder was developed in 1911 to help ships in the North
Atlantic spot floating icebergs, but when the war began, the sounder
was adapted to let ships detect enemy submarines instead. The
device sent waves of sound down through the water and recorded
the returning waves generated when the outgoing waves struck solid
objects. (Bats use a form of natural echo sounder to guide them as
they fly at night.) Analysis of the recorded echoes showed how far
away the objects were and gave some idea of their composition.
During World War II, Maurice Ewing, the seismology expert, and
J. Lamar Worzel (1919– ) modified the echo sounder to produce
continuous recordings that revealed the heights and depths of the
seafloor. (Unlike seismology, which provided information about lay-
ers of rock far beneath the ocean floor, the echo sounder produced
maps of the floor’s surface.) The sounder sent out an electronic tone
at regular intervals. A microphone inside the hull of the ship that
carried the device picked up the echo of the tone, reflected from the
ocean bottom, and recorded it with a stylus on a continuously spool-
ing strip of paper. Ewing and other scientists expanded their echo
sounding research after the war, accumulating thousands of miles’
worth of tracings. Their results suggested that the ocean bottom
could be divided into three regions: the continental shelves, the deep
seafloor, and the undersea mountain ranges called mid-ocean ridges.
The Wound That Never Heals

Maurice Ewing did his wartime echo sounder research at Woods
Hole, but he went on to join Columbia University in 1944. In 1949
00 Alfred Wegener
With Marie Tharp, Bruce Heezen discovered that ranges of undersea mountains, split
down their centers by rift valleys, curved through the middle of all the Earth’s oceans.
He called this mid-ocean ridge system “the wound that never heals.” (Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution Archives)
he founded the university’s Lamont Earth Observatory at a con-

verted mansion in the Hudson River Valley in 1949. There he gave
his seismic and echo sounding profiles to one of the institute’s
scientists, Bruce Heezen (1924–77), and suggested that Heezen
use them to draw up a map of the ocean floor. Heezen in turn
assigned the project to Marie Tharp (1920–2006), a young woman
who had just been hired as a drafting assistant in his department.
Tharp’s father had been a cartographer, or mapmaker, so she was
very familiar with maps. She was also one of the few women of her
time who had a master’s degree in geology; she had a degree in
mathematics as well.
Laying out thousands of tracings from echo sounders and seis-

mographs, Tharp began drawing up a map of the North Atlantic in
1952. The map’s most prominent feature was the Mid-Atlantic Ridge,
a chain of huge undersea mountains running north and south down
the middle of the sea. Scientists had known about this ridge since
the Challenger expedition in the 1870s. Tharp, however, noticed
something different about it: It seemed in fact to be two ranges, side
by side, with a narrow, V-shaped valley running between them. It
reminded Tharp of the well-known Rift Valley in East Africa, which
Alfred Wegener had suggested was a spot where continents were
moving away from each other. When she first told Heezen about the
undersea rift valley, though, he rejected it with a groan: “It can’t be.
It looks too much like continental drift!”
Tharp soon returned with new evidence for her seemingly out-
rageous claim. A map of deep-sea earthquakes drawn up by another
scientist in the same laboratory showed that the quakes were concen-
trated along the same valley she had noticed. That match increased
the odds that the valley was real—and important. After a year of
discussions, Tharp finally convinced Heezen that she was right.
Tharp and Heezen went on to make maps of the world’s other
ocean basins. They found that the Mid-Atlantic Ridge—and its cen-
tral rift valley—were not alone. Similar ranges of mountains and val-
leys associated with undersea earthquakes appeared on the floor of
every sea. Together they formed a gigantic chain some 40,000 miles
(64,000 km) long that snaked around the Earth like the curving seam
on a baseball. These undersea ranges blended into rift valleys on land
in sites such as East Africa and the line of the San Andreas Fault in
California. Heezen became convinced that the valleys represented a
crack in the Earth’s crust through which new crust was constantly
being formed by volcanoes that spewed up hot lava from the mantle
layer beneath. He called the curving line of interconnected gashes
“the wound that never heals.”
Maurice Ewing disliked the idea of continental drift even more
than Heezen had. Nonetheless, Heezen in turn finally persuaded
Ewing that he and Tharp had actually found evidence that supported
Wegener’s half-discarded theory. Ewing first described the global
ridge-and-rift system at a meeting of the American Geophysical
0 Alfred Wegener
Union in 1956, and Heezen did the same during another meeting
at Princeton University in 1957. After this latter meeting, Harry
Hess (1906–69), the head of the Princeton geology department, told
Heezen, “Young man, you have shaken the foundations of geology.”
Magnetic Moments
Some of the most important discoveries in the 1950s came from a
geological specialty that had not even existed in Alfred Wegener’s
time: paleomagnetism, the study of the Earth’s magnetic field in past
geological eras. Scientists had known for hundreds of years that the
planet acts like a giant magnet, producing its own magnetic field.
It has north and south magnetic poles as well as geographical ones.
They had also known that rocks containing large amounts of iron,
such as basalt and some other kinds of igneous rocks—rocks made
from the molten material of the mantle and spewed out in volcanoes
or other eruptions from the depths—could be magnetized. The first
compass needles, in fact, came from a naturally magnetized mineral
called magnetite, or lodestone.
Igneous rocks pick up their magnetic alignment as they cool past
a certain temperature, called the Curie point after French physicist
Pierre Curie. The iron particles in the rocks align in the direc-
tion that the planet’s magnetic field has at the time they pass this
temperature, and they keep that alignment after the rocks harden.
Some kinds of sedimentary rocks, made from material deposited on
ancient seabeds, can be magnetized by a different process; they also
keep their magnetic alignment. These magnetized rocks therefore
become what marine archaeologist and explorer Robert Ballard has
called “fossil compass needles.” Comparing magnetized rocks of dif-
ferent ages (as determined by measuring radioactive decay in them)
can reveal patterns of past changes in the planet’s magnetic field.
In the mid-1950s, scientists studying paleomagnetism found
that the Earth’s magnetic poles (and therefore probably also the
(Opposite page) In the mid-1950s, Marie Tharp, Bruce Heezen, and Maurice Ewing
showed that a single, more or less continuous system of mountains (ridges) and narrow
rift valleys, which they called the mid-ocean ridge, snakes through the floors of the
world’s oceans like the seam on a baseball. The ridge system proved to be a major site
where new crust is created through seafloor spreading.
0 Alfred Wegener
geographic poles) appeared to have had different locations in the

past. In other words, the poles had “wandered,” more or less as
Alfred Wegener had said. Stanley K. Runcorn (1922–95) and other
geologists at Cambridge University in England announced in 1955
that, according to “fossil” magnetic fields in European rocks of
different ages, the planet’s magnetic north pole seemed to have
changed its position steadily over geologic time. Runcorn believed
that the pole had started from a spot near Hawaii in the Proterozoic
eon and reached its present position in the Upper (later) Tertiary.
At first, Runcorn did not feel that his evidence for polar wan-
dering necessarily supported continental drift. When his group
went on to study rocks in North America, however, they found that
rocks of the same age on the two continents showed different polar
wandering paths. The only sensible explanation for this fact was
that the continents had occupied different positions in earlier times
than they do today. From 1956 on, therefore, Runcorn became a
strong supporter of the drift theory. Other researchers found simi-
lar results in the rocks of the continents thought to have made up
the former Gondwanaland.
At the same time Stanley Runcorn was finding magnetic evi-
dence that the poles—or the continents, or both—had wandered in
the past, two researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography
made a second important discovery in paleomagnetism. They used
a new form of sensitive magnetometer—an instrument that can
measure the strength and direction of a magnetic field—that P. M. S.
Blackett (1897–1974), a British physicist, had invented shortly after
World War I. During World War II, Blackett’s magnetometer had
been modified so that it could be towed behind aircraft or ships to
detect enemy submarines. Scientists at Scripps improved the device
further in the 1950s, making it able to create continuous recordings
of the magnetic fields given off by rocks on the seafloor.
In 1955 and 1956, Scripps scientists Ronald Mason and Arthur
Raff (1917–99) used shipborne magnetometers to obtain magnetic
patterns around an undersea ridge (mountain range) in the north-
eastern Pacific, off North America’s western coast. Their results
were totally unlike any that had been found on land. In two different
areas they found patterns of strongly and weakly magnetized rocks,
alternating like the stripes on a bar code or a zebra’s back. The

stripes ran north and south, just like the ridge. They also were offset,
or displaced relative to one another, along earthquake faults that ran
perpendicular to the ridge.
Raff and Mason published their “zebra maps” in a paper in the
August 1961 issue of the Geological Society of America Bulletin. At
the time, the two scientists could not explain their results. Their
findings, however, would be the first of a series that provided the
key for understanding how the Earth creates new crust and, in the
process, moves the continents.
The Plate Tectonics
Revolution

A few years after Bruce Heezen’s startling speech at Princeton,
Harry Hess took his own turn at shaking the foundations of
geology. He did so by turning from the land, geology’s traditional
place of study, to the sea.
In what he called “an essay in geopoetry,” Hess offered a complete
theory of the way the Earth’s crust was formed, destroyed, and recy-
cled beneath the oceans. He first described his ideas in a report to the
Office of Naval Research in 1960. He circulated the report widely in
manuscript form before finally publishing it as “History of the Ocean
Basins” in an anthology of papers that appeared in 1962. Robert Dietz
(1914–95), who worked for the Office of Naval Research, published
a similar theory in 1961 and gave it the name by which both his and
Hess’s ideas generally became known: seafloor spreading.
0
The Plate Tectonics revolution 0
Seafloor Spreading
The Earth’s crust, Hess said, moved
slowly but constantly. It was pushed
and pulled by the same force that
Arthur Holmes and a few others
had spoken of for decades: convec-
tion currents in the asthenosphere,
the soft, weak layer on which the
crust rested. Unlike Holmes, how-
ever, Hess focused on the way these
currents affected seafloors rather
than landmasses.
Hess believed that rising con-
vection currents forced the crust
apart along the valley inside the In 1962, Harry Hess of Princeton
University published the theory of sea-
mid-ocean ridge. As the crust tore floor spreading, which explains how the
open, hot water rushed upward Earth’s crust is created and destroyed
on the ocean floors. Hess believed that
into the gap. The water reacted the continents did not push through
with the crust’s edges to create the mantle, as Alfred Wegener had
proposed, but rather were carried along
a new form of rock. (Dietz said with the rest of the crust as convection
instead that the new material was currents in the mantle moved it.
(Princeton University Library)
magma, or molten rock, that oozed
up into the cracks from the mantle.
Earth scientists now believe that this view is correct.) Each wave of
new rock pushed the older rock away from the crack on both sides.
Because the new rock was hot, it was less dense than the rock it dis-
placed. It therefore rose up and formed parallel ridges on both sides of
the valley. The ridges sloped off on the outside as the rock cooled and
sank to the level of the seafloor plain.
The motion of the crust that began at these spots slowly changed
the location of the continents, carrying them along as if on a conveyor
belt. This picture, Hess emphasized, was quite different from Alfred
Wegener’s proposal that the continents pushed through the mantle
layer on their own. “The continents do not plow through oceanic
crust impelled by unknown forces,” Hess wrote in his 1962 paper.
108 Alfred Wegener
“Rather they ride passively on mantle material as it comes to the sur-

face at the crest of the ridge and then moves laterally away from it.”
Bruce Heezen and some other scientists who shared Hess’s belief
that new ocean floor was created inside the mid-ocean ridges had
thought that the Earth must be expanding to accommodate the new
crust. Hess, however, said that crust was destroyed as well as cre-
ated, leaving the planet’s size unchanged. The destruction came in
the ocean trenches, where the sinking side of convection cells pulled
pieces of crust down into the hot asthenosphere and melted them.
Hess had begun to suspect the role of the trenches after joining Felix
Vening Meinesz on the 1930s expeditions that revealed unusually
low gravity in oceanic trenches. Hess called the trenches the “jaw
crushers” of his crust-recycling system.
Hess’s theory was the first to describe a complete cycle for
seafloor movement, covering both creation and destruction. It also
Mantle
An illustration that shows how seafloor spreading at a mid-ocean ridge can create new
crust. Molten rock from the Earth’s mantle is forced upward to the surface of the crust
at vents or fissures in the rift valley within the ridge. When the hot liquid rock contacts
the icy ocean water, the rock solidifies, pushing away the seafloor on either side of it.
As the seafloor moves away from the valley, it forms the mountains of the ridge.
explained Maurice Ewing’s observation that the seafloor appeared to

be very young—a mere 200 to 300 million years old at the most. At
first, however, it did not shake the foundations of geology very hard,
because Hess could provide little evidence to support it. Almost the
only geological fact he cited was a discovery that he himself had made
during World War II, when he had been captain of the Cape Johnson,
a troop transport ship that repeatedly crossed the Pacific Ocean. The
Cape Johnson had an echo sounder that was supposed to be used to
show the depth of water off unknown coastlines so that the Cape
Johnson would not run aground. Hess, however, left the sounder on
all the time, even when the ship was in the open sea. The result was a
continuous tracing of the heights and depths of the ocean floor.
The sounder had revealed isolated, flat-topped mountains lying
on the seafloor between the mid-ocean ridges and the trenches,
their tops far below the level of the waves. Hess called these strange
seamounts guyots, after Arnold Henry Guyot (1807–84), Princeton’s
first professor of geology. He later concluded that the guyots were
extinct volcanoes, formed as parts of the ocean ridges. Their tops
had once projected above the water, but erosion had slowly flattened
them down to sea level. As the moving crust pushed the guyots
away from the peaks of the ridges, Hess wrote, they sank lower and
lower, eventually reaching levels as much as 1.2 miles (2 km) below
the water. Hess noticed that the farther away the guyots were from
the mid-ocean ridge, the deeper (and therefore probably older) they
were. In his 1962 essay he said that the changing position of the guy-
ots provided evidence that the location of geological features in the
ocean could change dramatically over time.
Linking Spreading to Magnetic Changes

About the time Hess was publishing his work, Frederick Vine
(1939– ), a geophysicist at Britain’s Cambridge University, became
interested in the underwater magnetic “bar codes” that Arthur Raff
and Ronald Mason had observed a few years earlier. Vine made mag-
netometer tracings of his own during a 1962 cruise to the Carlsberg
Ridge in the Indian Ocean and programmed a computer to turn
them into a kind of map. He found a striped pattern much like the
0 Alfred Wegener
one Raff and Mason had seen. Vine and his adviser at Cambridge,
Drummond Matthews (1931–97), wrote a paper on the subject,
“Magnetic Anomalies over Oceanic Ridges,” which appeared in the
journal Nature in September 1963.
In their paper, Vine and Matthews connected the striped
magnetic patterns with Hess’s theory of seafloor spreading. They
also linked these ideas with another subject that paleomagnetism
researchers were investigating: possible past reversals in the Earth’s
magnetic field. The magnetism in most rocks is oriented toward
the north magnetic pole; that is why lodestone compass needles
pointed north. In the early 20th century, however, a French physicist
Bernard Brunhes (1867–1910) and a Japanese geophysicist Motonori
Matuyama (1884–1958) found magnetized rocks that were oriented
toward the south pole instead. These discoveries led the men to pro-
pose that the Earth’s magnetic field had reversed its polarity from
time to time during past geological eras.
Most Earth scientists thought this idea too fantastic to con-
sider, but some support for it had been found by the time Vine and
Matthews wrote their paper. In the 1950s, researchers had developed
an improved technique for dating rocks that was based on the break-
down of radioactive potassium into argon. Using this technique, two
groups of paleomagnetists showed in the early 1960s that lava rocks
of the same age from different parts of the world had the same mag-
netic polarity, whether normal or reversed. This fact supported the
idea that the reversals in the rocks had come from changes in the
Earth’s whole magnetic field rather than from local effects.
Allan Cox (1926–87), Richard Doell (1923–2008), and Brent
Dalrymple (1937– ), three California geologists, proposed in the
early 1960s that if a time line for past magnetic reversals could be
worked out by means of radioactive dating, the reversals them-
selves could be used as a dating technique. They published the
first crude time line of magnetic reversals in land rocks in 1963
and an improved version in 1964. The time line included four long
“epochs,” named after magnetic research pioneers, and numer-
ous “events”—very brief reversals, lasting less than 100,000 years
each—named after locations. Identification of the events allowed
the dating to be very precise.
The Plate Tectonics revolution
Vine and Matthews wrote that the magnetic striping they had
seen was
consistent with, in fact virtually a corollary of, current ideas
on ocean floor spreading and periodic reversals in the Earth’s
magnetic field. . . . If spreading of the ocean floor occurs,
blocks of alternatively normal and reversely magnetized
material would drift away from the centre of the [mid-ocean]
ridge and parallel to the crest of it.
The patterns of stripes on the left and right sides of a ridge would
be mirror images of each other, Vine and Matthews said, because the
rocks on both sides of the ridge were formed at the same time and
place. The rocks therefore would cool and pick up their magnetiza-
tion at the same time. As time passed and the Earth’s magnetic field
reversed, strips of normal and inverted polarity would be laid down.
The mirror-image effect would remain because the layers of rock
would be pushed away from the ridge at about the same speed in
both directions.
Lawrence Morley (1920– ), a Canadian geophysicist, developed
a set of ideas much like those of Vine and Matthews at about the same
time, so the proposal that seafloor spreading and magnetic seafloor
striping explained each other became known as the Vine-Matthews-
Morley hypothesis. At first it went over, David M. Lawrence quotes
Vine as saying in Upheaval from the Abyss: Ocean Floor Mapping
and the Earth Science Revolution, like “the classic lead balloon.” Most
Earth scientists rejected it because it combined three ideas that were
all regarded as unproven at best: seafloor spreading, the past reversal
of the Earth’s magnetic field, and the possible use of “fossil” magne-
tism in rocks as a method of dating.
Vine and John Tuzo Wilson (1908–93), a geophysicist at the
University of Toronto, tested the Vine-Matthews-Morley proposal
by recording magnetic striping around the Juan de Fuca Ridge, an
undersea ridge in the waters off the state of Washington and the coast
of British Columbia. In a paper published in 1965, Vine and Wilson
showed that in most places the striping revealed the symmetrical,
mirror-image pattern they had predicted. They also used their the-
ory and the Cox-Doell-Dalrymple chronology to create a computer
Alfred Wegener
model of the pattern that would be expected around the ridge if the
seafloor had spread at a steady rate. The pattern produced by the
model was fairly close to the pattern that Vine and Wilson had actu-
ally found. When Vine changed the computer model to reflect some
new dates in the magnetic time line that he learned about in late 1965,
the model matched the real results even more.
Converging Lines of Evidence

Several researchers at Lamont Earth Observatory in New York,
meanwhile, were also studying magnetic patterns in rocks. One, Neil
Opdyke (1933– ), examined layers of sedimentary rocks that other
Lamont scientists had taken from the seafloor with coring devices.
The patterns Opdyke and his students found in cores taken from
several oceans showed a close match with both the striping patterns
around the ridges and the time lines that Cox and his fellow work-
ers had drawn up. The fact that Opdyke’s sedimentary rocks and the
Cox group’s lavas showed the same pattern helped to confirm the
idea that magnetic reversals were real and affected the Earth’s entire
magnetic field.
Opdyke and his graduate student John Foster also found good
matches between dates for core layers obtained by the reversal meth-
od and those obtained by the more traditional technique of examin-
ing fossils in the core samples. This provided further confirmation
that the reversal method was reliable. “Through magnetic reversals
we can correlate synchronous events in different sediments, with
different fossils, all over the world,” William Wertenbaker quotes
Opdyke as saying in The Floor of the Sea. In other words, as John
Foster put it, the magnetic reversals were a “universal fossil.”
A Lamont graduate student, Walter C. Pitman III (1931– ),
was working in the office next to Opdyke’s. Pitman had sailed on a
(Opposite page) Reversals of the Earth’s magnetic field are recorded in the crust of the
seafloor. When magma (molten rock) rises up from the mantle at a mid-ocean ridge and
cools, iron crystals in the rock align with the direction (polarity) that the planet’s mag-
netic field has at that time. Researchers found “stripes” of rocks showing normal and
reversed magnetic fields, like a bar code or marks on a zebra’s back, around several
mid-ocean ridges. A timetable of magnetic reversals derived from land rocks, as well as
dating of cores from the seafloor by use of fossils, confirmed that older pieces of crust
were farther away from the ridges than younger ones. Some magnetic reversal patterns
showed striking mirror-image symmetry centered on the ridges, suggesting that new
crust was being pushed away from the ridges at an equal rate of speed on both sides.
Alfred Wegener
research vessel called the Eltanin in late 1965 when it made several
passages through the waters of Antarctica, collecting a variety of
oceanographic data. These data included magnetic profiles of the
Pacific-Antarctic Ridge, part of the mid-ocean ridge system that
Bruce Heezen and Marie Tharp had discovered. Pitman and another
graduate student Ellen Herron began analyzing the profiles, along
with some from an earlier cruise, when they returned to Lamont in
November 1965. In December, Pitman noticed that the profiles from
the part of the cruise labeled Leg 20 looked remarkably like Vine
and Wilson’s Juan de Fuca patterns, which had just been published.
When he pointed this out to another Lamont researcher, though, the
man just laughed and said, “Next thing, you’ll be proving [the] Vine
and Matthews [theory].”
Pitman knew very little about the Vine-Matthews-Morley
hypothesis, but, he told geologist-historian William Glen, “I began
✹ Eltanin 19: “too Perfect”

In William Glen’s The Road to Jaramillo, Walter Pitman recalled the
following
I remember staying [at Lamont] all night long one day, running
out magnified projected profiles . . . so they look as though
you’ve run perpendicular to a ridge axis. I pinned up all the
profiles of Eltanin 19, 20, and 21 on [Neil] Opdyke’s door
and went home for a bit of rest. When I came back the guy
[Opdyke] was just beside himself! He knew that we’d proved
seafloor spreading! It was the first time that you could see the
total similarity between the profiles. . . . The bilateral symme-
try of Eltanin 19 was the absolute crucial thing. Once Opdyke
saw that he said, “That’s it—you’ve got it!”
“For a few months Neil’s group and ours practically lived in each
other’s laps,” Pitman told another author, William Wertenbaker, as
Wertenbaker reports in The Floor of the Sea. “His pattern [of normal
and reverse magnetizations], that he was getting from sediments,
and our pattern were always the same.”
to smell something [interesting] at that time.” He made a point of

reading Vine and Matthews’s paper. Then, in January 1966, he went
on to analyze the magnetic data from an earlier Eltanin cruise, leg 19
(Eltanin 19 for short), which had crossed the East Pacific Rise.
Neil Opdyke was keeping a close watch on Pitman’s progress.
“What he knew, I knew within a day,” he said later. Unlike most of
the other Lamont researchers, Opdyke believed that the continental
drift theory and the related ideas of Hess, Vine, and Matthews were
probably right. He hoped that his own research, Pitman’s, or both
would uncover evidence to support them. When he first saw the
magnetic profile from Eltanin 19, he could hardly believe his eyes.
For about 400 miles (644 km), the symmetry of the pattern on the
two sides of the ridge was essentially perfect.
Frederick Vine was even more thrilled than Opdyke. When
Vine visited Lamont in February and saw the Eltanin 19 profile, he
Nonetheless, persuading James Heirtzler, the head of the paleo-

magnetics laboratory, and others at Lamont to share their excitement
took hard work. The very fact that the Eltanin 19 profile showed a
completely symmetrical pattern on both sides of the East Pacific Rise,
including all the reversals on the Cox-Doell-Dalrymple time line and
many earlier ones besides, made them doubt its reality. The reaction
of Lamont scientist Joe Worzel was typical, Pitman told William Glen:
Worzel looked at [the Eltanin 19 profile] for a while and finally
said, “Well, that knocks the seafloor-spreading nonsense into
a cocked hat.” I said, “What do you mean, Joe?” He said, “It’s
too perfect,” and walked out of the room.
In spite of their early skepticism, the naysayers eventually had
to admit that the perfection of what came to be called “Pitman’s
magic profile” actually existed. In April 1966, after Richard Doell, one
of the authors of the magnetic reversal timetable, saw the results
from Opdyke’s cores and the Eltanin 19 profile together, he said in a
stunned voice, “It’s so good it can’t possibly be true, but it is.”
Alfred Wegener
realized immediately that it proved his hypothesis. “It [is] all over
but the shouting,” he said. He told Pitman that that was the first
time he had been wholly convinced of his own theory.
Pitman (with his supervisor, J. R. Heirtzler) and Frederick Vine
both wrote papers about the Eltanin 19 profile and its relationship
to the Vine-Matthews-Morley theory that were published in the
journal Science in December 1966. Vine pointed out that he now had
three independent confirmations of his idea: his own Juan de Fuca
Ridge results, the Eltanin 19 profile, and the magnetic profiles from
Neil Opdyke’s sediment cores.
Shaking Up Geology
Still more confirmation of seafloor spreading soon came from a dif-
ferent geological specialty: seismology. In June 1966, Pitman and
Heirtzler showed the Eltanin-19 profile to Lynn Sykes (1937– ) and
Jack Oliver (1923– ), two Lamont seismologists. Sykes and Oliver
had been studying undersea earthquakes, using a computer program
developed at Lamont that could locate the epicenters of such quakes
far more accurately than had been possible before. After seeing the
“magic” profile, Sykes and Oliver went “roaring back,” as Pitman put
it to William Wertenbaker, to look at their own data again.
Sykes had been looking for a way to test a theory that John Tuzo
Wilson had proposed in a 1965 paper, “A New Class of Faults and
Their Bearing on Continental Drift.” In this paper, Wilson claimed
that the Earth’s crust was divided into rigid plates that floated on the
asthenosphere. The continents were part of these plates and were
carried along with the plates when convection currents in the asthe-
nosphere made the plates move. Plate boundaries, he said, could be
of three types: mid-ocean ridges, trenches, or a type of earthquake
zone that Wilson called a transform fault. Lamont researchers study-
ing the Mid-Atlantic Ridge had noticed in 1962 that many parts of
the ridge were offset, or displaced horizontally with respect to each
other, for hundreds of miles, creating a shape that looked more like
an uneven staircase than a smooth curve. Wilson placed his trans-
form faults on the offsets, or “steps” of the staircase, which were
known to be the sites of frequent earthquakes.
Adjoining plates were

pulled apart at the ridges,
Wilson said. At the trenches,
plates were pushed together,
forcing one plate to ride up
over the other. Mountains or
islands were created on the
upper plate, while the edge
of the lower plate was pushed
down into the trench and
absorbed. Transform faults
appeared when plates slid past
each other, making earthquake
zones that ran perpendicular John Tuzo Wilson, a geophysicist at the
to the line where the plates University of Toronto, is shown here in 1967,
about the time that most Earth scientists ac-
scraped together. Wilson gave cepted the theory of plate tectonics. Wilson,
the faults this name because he in a 1965 article, was the first to describe
the Earth’s moving crust as being divided into
believed that they were trans- plates. He also showed how the plates in-
formed into either a ridge or a teracted with one another and named a new
kind of earthquake fault, the transform fault.
trench at their ends, where the (University of Toronto Department of Physics)
earthquake action was known
to stop. Ridges, trenches, and
transform faults were the main spots where the crust was moving,
according to Wilson’s theory. They were also the places where most
volcanoes, earthquakes, and mountains or island arcs appeared.
Sykes had wanted to test Wilson’s ideas about transform faults,
and his look at the Eltanin 19 profile, which seemed to confirm
seafloor spreading so strikingly, made him even more determined
to do so. Using new, sensitive seismographs that could show the
direction of the first motions in quakes, he analyzed earthquakes
that had occurred along fracture zones perpendicular to the crests of
the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and the East Pacific Rise. “Essentially I knew
what I had inside a week,” he told William Wertenbaker. “I looked
at twenty earthquakes and they all worked.” Sykes had expected to
disprove Wilson’s theory, but the motions he found in fact fitted
with what Wilson had predicted. “They were exactly the opposite of
what classical geology predicts for horizontal fault motion,” Sykes
8 Alfred Wegener
said. “Sea floor spreading was the only thing that could produce
those earthquakes.”
Sykes, Oliver, and another Lamont seismologist Bryan Isacks
(1936– ), also had been trying to confirm another part of the sea-
floor spreading theory by studying deep earthquakes—those cen-
tered in the mantle rather than the crust. Such earthquakes had been
found to occur only under trenches and island arcs, the very spots
(called subduction zones) where Hess had suggested that his “jaw
crusher” was pulling pieces of crust down into the mantle. In late
1966, the group concluded from their earthquake data that a 60-mile
(97-km) thick slab of crust was being dragged down near Tonga, a
group of islands in the South Pacific. “All of a sudden, it became very
simple and obvious,” Sykes told William Wertenbaker. “We were led
to the conclusion that the [deep] earthquake zone is the same as the
seafloor, and then . . . that the seafloor was being pushed, or pulled,
down into the mantle to form the zone.” The motion was causing
the earthquakes. Subduction provided the other half of the process
begun by seafloor spreading, recycling the crust and keeping the
overall amount of crust the same.
Mathematical Support
Wilson’s 1965 paper had been the first to present a complete the-
ory that tied seafloor spreading to continental drift. In 1967, Jason
Morgan (1935– ) provided mathematical support for Wilson’s
ideas about plate movement. Morgan, like Hess and Vine, was a
member of the Princeton University geology department. With
the help of a computer and a mathematical formula called Euler’s
theorem, Morgan calculated how rigid blocks—an approximation
of Wilson’s plates—would move on the surface of a sphere. He used
the three types of boundaries (ridges, trenches, and transform faults)
that Wilson had discussed. The results fitted extremely well with the
actual movements that had been observed. A Cambridge University
geophysicist Dan McKenzie (1942– ) did much the same thing at
about the same time.
Xavier Le Pichon (1937– ), a French scientist visiting Lamont,
applied Morgan’s method to what was known about the magnetic
anomalies, the seismic data,

and reconstruction of past
plate motions. Like Morgan, Le
Pichon found that mathemati-
cally modeling the rotation
of rigid plates around an axis
could account for the differ-
ent amounts, as well as kinds,
of geological activity at the
undersea ridges, the trench-
es, and the fracture zones or
transform faults, as well as
in the interior of the plates.
“All movements [of plates] are
interconnected,” Le Pichon
emphasized when he presented
his work at the 1967 meeting
Jason Morgan of Princeton University created
of the American Geophysical a mathematical model showing how rigid
Union. “Any major changes in blocks might move on a sphere. Morgan’s
work provided a mathematical underpinning
the pattern of spreading must for the theory of plate tectonics. (Trustees of
be global.” Princeton University)
A New Theory of Earth Movement

All these ideas and pieces of research came together in three key geo-
logical meetings in 1966 and 1967. The American Geophysical Union
held two of these meetings in April 1966 and April 1967 in Washington,
D.C. The third meeting took place in November 1966 at the Goddard
Institute for Space Studies in New York and was sponsored by the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
These meetings were as important to the acceptance of the new
theory of the Earth as the New York oil geology meeting 40 years
before had been to the rejection of Alfred Wegener’s ideas. They
ended what William Wertenbaker in his 1974 book, The Floor of
the Sea, calls a “period of almost unbearable excitement” that some
have termed “the most remarkable period in the history of geol-
ogy.” By the end of 1967, the opinion of almost every member of
0 Alfred Wegener
the geological community about the idea that the continents could
move had reversed as abruptly as the planet’s magnetic poles some-
times had done.
Bryan Isacks, Lynn Sykes, and Jack Oliver pulled all the research
together in a paper titled “Seismology and the New Global Tectonics,”
which was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research in
September 1968. Expanding on the ideas of Hess, Vine, Wilson, and
others, this paper outlined a new overarching theory of the Earth’s
movement called plate tectonics, after a Greek word meaning “to
build.” It held that the Earth’s crust and uppermost mantle, down
to about 62 miles (100 km), is rigid and has significant resistance to
earthquake waves. This combined zone, the lithosphere, overlies the
asthenosphere, a zone of hot rock that extends down to about 435
miles (700 km). The asthenosphere is solid, but in the long course of
geologic time it can flow like a thick liquid.
The lithosphere is divided into seven large and about a dozen
smaller plates. Islands and continents are the parts of the plates that
show above sea level. Impelled by forces in the asthenosphere that
are still poorly understood, the plates move slowly around the globe.
Crust is created at some spots on the seafloor and destroyed in equal
amounts at others, keeping the planet the same size.
From the first days of its acceptance to the present, writers have
given high praise to the plate tectonics theory. In A Revolution in
the Earth Sciences, published in 1973, science historian Anthony
Hallam called plate tectonics “the biggest advance in Earth science
since acceptance in the early nineteenth century of the paradigms of
uniformitarianism and stratigraphical correlation of fossils [the idea
that fossils could be used to show the age of rock layers] established
geology as a true science.”
The acceptance of plate tectonics brought profound changes,
not only to Earth scientists’ understanding of the history of Earth’s
crust, but to their view of the planet as a whole—and of the scien-
tific disciplines that study it. As John Tuzo Wilson said in 1968,
plate tectonics showed that “the Earth, instead of appearing as
an inert statue, is a living, mobile thing.” The theory emphasized
how much Earth had changed in the past and is still changing. At
the same time, it demonstrated that some supposed changes that
The theory of plate tectonics, descended from Alfred Wegener’s continental drift theory,
became widely accepted in the mid-1960s. It states that the Earth’s crust is divided into
seven large and about a dozen smaller plates. These plates are constantly in motion,
pushed by convection currents and other forces in the mantle below. Earthquakes and
volcanic eruptions occur in places where plates collide or rub against one another.
Alfred Wegener
geologists had long accepted were false: the planet was neither
shrinking nor expanding.
“The new view of the Earth [plate tectonics] was revolution-
ary . . . because it was a global theory in the dual sense of being
a whole-Earth theory and a theory which drew upon and drew
together all fields of the [Earth] science,” H. E. LeGrand wrote in
Drifting Continents and Shifting Theories. Rather than describing
particular areas or rock formations, plate tectonics encompassed
the entire planet, which it portrayed as a system of interacting
parts. The theory helped scientists realize that—just as Alfred
Wegener had urged—such a system could be understood only
when researchers from many fields worked together. It is probably
no accident that scientists began using the umbrella term “Earth
science” at about the same time that they accepted the new world-
view of plate tectonics.
Finally, plate tectonics marked a turn away from the strictly
descriptive fieldwork so popular in Wegener’s day toward the kind of
overarching theory that Wegener had proposed. John Tuzo Wilson
emphasized and praised this change. Instead of simply describing
changes that had occurred in the past, Wilson said, Earth science
could now focus on explaining those past changes and predicting
future ones.
The acceptance of continental drift [in the new form of plate
tectonics] has transformed the Earth sciences from a group of
rather unimaginative studies based upon pedestrian interpre-
tations of natural phenomena into a unified science that holds
the promise of great intellectual and practical advances.
Why did the community of Earth scientists accept plate tecton-
ics so quickly when it had resisted continental drift for so long? No
doubt there were several reasons. Science historian Naomi Oreskes
thinks that one reason was that so much of the evidence supporting
plate tectonics came from geophysics. Geophysics depends on direct
measurements and mathematical calculations, so it is difficult to dis-
pute. By contrast, most of Alfred Wegener’s evidence for continental
drift came from supposed similarities between rock formations or
fossils in different parts of the world. It is easy to disagree about how
similar two things really are, and similarities often can be explained
in more than one way.
Another reason may have been that in the case of plate tecton-
ics, the Earth science community itself decided that the evidence
was convincing enough to make the theory acceptable. Wegener
assembled research findings from many scientists and stated that
they provided clear proof of his idea, but his critics accused him of
selecting only the studies that agreed with him. For plate tectonics,
the scientists made their own selections and judgments.
Finally, according to Anthony Hallam, plate tectonics succeeded
because it met the requirements for a useful theory. “By the criteria
normally used to judge the quality of scientific theories, namely
precision, scope, explanatory value, and testability, plate tectonics
scores highly,” Hallam wrote in A Revolution in the Earth Sciences.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, researchers applied the new theory to
many areas of Earth science and solved longstanding puzzles, such as
the way mountains are formed.
Plate Tectonics Today

Earth scientists still feel that the theory of plate tectonics is the best
description of the way the Earth’s crust is formed and destroyed
and interacts. New techniques and tools have led to new discoveries
about plate movement, however, and the theory has been modified
to reflect these new findings.
Researchers concluded by the 1970s, for instance, that some
parts of Harry Hess’s theory of seafloor spreading, which underlay
plate tectonics, were oversimplified. New research suggested that
convection currents alone may not be strong enough to move the
crustal plates. Some Earth scientists think that gravity may be the
chief moving force, dragging cold, dense pieces of crust down into
the mantle at subduction zones and pulling the attached plates along
with them. Others believe that large-scale currents in the mantle do
account for most of the motion, but the currents are more complex
than those that Hess described.
Also in the 1970s, Earth scientists learned that plates often carry
with them small pieces of other plates, called terranes. Terranes
Alfred Wegener
scrape off one plate and stick to another during collisions between
plates, much as paint might rub off on a person’s jacket when the
person brushes against a newly painted fence. Terranes are most
often transferred when one plate is pulled under another. The border
between the terrane and the plate it lies upon is often marked by an
earthquake fault. Terranes also can be identified because their char-
acteristics are different from those of the rocks around them. Some
areas, such as parts of North America’s western coast, are complex
patchworks of terranes from different sources.
Classic plate tectonics proposed that plates move at a steady
rate overall, but that may not always have been true. Paul Silver
of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and Mark Behn of the
Wood Hole Oceanographic Institution said in 2008 that they had
found evidence that about a billion years ago, plate motion—spe-
cifically, subduction—stopped almost entirely for a while. Their
conclusion was based on measurements of the rate at which the
Earth gives off heat. If the planet had always released heat at its
present rate, the researchers said, it should be cooler than it is. A
periodic slowdown or stopping of plate movement could explain
how the heat was retained. “If the tectonic plates are moving, the
Earth releases more heat and cools down faster,” Behn said. “If you
don’t have those cracked and moving plates, then heat has to get
out by diffusing through the solid rock, which is much slower.”
According to Space Daily, which reported the research, Silver and
Behn concluded that “rather than being continuous, plate tectonics
may work intermittently through Earth history, turning on and off
as the planet remakes itself.”
The way in which pieces of crust sink into the mantle also may
differ from the original plate tectonics picture. A team of British and
Swiss scientists reported in early 2008 that, contrary to what experts
had thought, the edges of old, heavy plates may be dragged only as
far as the boundary between the upper and the lower mantle. They
then flatten out and lie on top of the boundary. This is happening
near Tonga, the Mariana Islands, and Japan. Younger, more flexible
plates, on the other hand, bend and fold at the boundary for tens of
millions of years, then reach a critical mass and sink rapidly into the
lower mantle, dragging the rest of the plate after them at high speed.
The scientists believe that this is occurring in Central and South

America, where movements have been more rapid than researchers
would expect for such young plates.
Some new information about plate tectonics comes from new
technology, such as satellites. Scientists began using satellites to
track plate motion in the 1980s. They have determined that the
continents move an average of 1.6 inches (4 cm) each year. Satellites
with radar altimeters map the ocean floor by recording bulges and
dips on the ocean’s surface that reflect the topography far below.
Other satellites detect gravity anomalies like the ones that intrigued
George Everest and Felix Vening Meinesz.
In 2006, images from the European Space Agency’s Envisat satel-
lite showed a new piece of crust being created—not at sea but on (or
rather below) land. Tim Wright of the University of Leeds, leader of
an international team that interpreted the satellite results, reported
that a huge rift, 37 miles (60 km) long and up to 26 feet (8 m) wide,
was opening beneath the dry, barren Afar region of Ethiopia. This
area, long known for its volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, lies at
the border between the Arabian and Nubian tectonic plates. The
crust is stretched thin there, and an upsurge of molten magma tore
it open. The rift was the largest ever spotted by satellite monitoring.
“The process happening here is identical to that which created the
Atlantic Ocean,” Wright told the Guardian. “If this continues, we
believe parts of Eritrea, Ethiopia and Djibouti will sink low enough
to allow water to flow in from the Red Sea.”
Some researchers have focused on the past and the future
of plate tectonics. Hubert Staudigel of the Scripps Institution of
Oceanography reported in 2007 that ancient rocks from southern
Greenland—the oldest known pieces of Earth’s crust—indicated that
the continents were moving 3.8 billion years ago, very early in the
planet’s 4.5-billion-year history. Looking at the other end of the tec-
tonic time cycle, Christopher Scotese, a geologist at the University
of Texas at Arlington, believes that 250 million years from now, the
continents will converge once more into a new Pangaea, which he
calls Pangaea Ultima.
Earth scientists will continue to investigate the way the planet’s
crust moves and has moved in the past. Perhaps their discoveries
Alfred Wegener
will merely refine the understanding of the planet that plate tecton-
ics provides, as has happened so far. It is equally possible, though,
that they will uncover something completely new. Their findings
may alter scientific opinion as radically as the discoveries in paleo-
magnetism, seismology, and other fields altered the Earth science
community’s view of continental drift in the 1960s. Such a surprise
can always happen, because science—like the Earth itself—never
stops changing.
Conclusion:
Reaching into the Future
A lfred Wegener’s continental drift is not the same as the theory

of plate tectonics. Wegener presented a completely different
picture of how and why the continents move than plate tectonics
does. Nonetheless, just as creatures as diverse as mice, elephants,
and human beings evolved from the simple mammals that hid in
the forests where dinosaurs roamed, so plate tectonics evolved from
continental drift. The two theories share the basic idea that the
Earth’s crust, both land and sea, is undergoing slow but constant
change. As part of that change, even the largest landmasses and the
widest oceans may alter their positions on the globe.
Wegener gathered from a wide range of geological fields what
he felt was an impressive quantity of evidence to support his theo-
ry—but it was not enough. His critics were quick to point out that

8 Alfred Wegener
some of his information was inaccurate and some could be, or even
had to be, interpreted in ways other than the ones he suggested. He
(and the scientists who ridiculed him) lacked the data that would
later provide such convincing support for plate tectonics. Some of
that data came from fields such as paleomagnetism, which did not
even exist in Wegener’s time.
What Wegener did have was what F. K. Mather, editor of an
influential reference book called The Source Book of Geology, called
“one of the most fertile geological imaginations of this century.” That
imagination let him build the seemingly trivial observation of simi-
larities in the outlines of Africa and South America into a complete
picture of the Earth’s dynamic past.
Underlying and guiding that imagination, according to people
who knew him, was a powerful instinct for recognizing which items
in the welter of facts and ideas that make up any science were truly
important. “Wegener possessed a sense for the significant that sel-
dom erred,” Hans Benndorf, a colleague, wrote in a memorial essay.
W. Wundt, another acquaintance, elaborated on the same idea:
Alfred Wegener . . . had an extraordinary talent for observa-
tion and knowing what is . . . both simple and important, and
what can be expected to give a result. Added to this was a rig-
orous logic, which enabled him to assemble rightly everything
relevant to his ideas.
Wegener also had the courage to believe in his imagination. He
refused to abandon his plans and goals, no matter what challenges
he faced. He showed this determination most obviously in his career
as an Arctic explorer. “He was a man of action, whose iron will and
unflagging energy led him to extraordinary achievements,” Hans
Benndorf wrote. His courage was not limited to physical challenges.
He revealed it just as clearly in the persistence with which he advo-
cated his drift theory in the face of powerful opposition. Each new
edition of his book included answers to his critics and additional
evidence to support his ideas.
Because of these qualities, Alfred Wegener was able to do
something that few people, in science or any other form of human
activity, can achieve: He stepped beyond his own time. His ideas
Conclusion 129
were too strange for most of his contemporaries to appreciate, but

they survived to inspire a later generation of scientists who had
not even been born at the time he lost his life on the unforgiving
Arctic ice. Those scientists, in turn, applied new knowledge and
technologies and succeeded where Wegener, through little fault of
his own, had failed. They persuaded the Earth science community
that the once-despised theory of moving continents was right and,
in doing so, created a new vision of a dynamic, ever-changing Earth.
“As the man who really started it all,” Anthony Hallam wrote in A
Revolution in the Earth Sciences, “Alfred Wegener deserves wider
recognition as one of the most important scientific innovators of . . .
[the 20th] century.”
Chronology
1644 René Descartes offers the first complete sci-

entific theory of Earth’s origin, history, and
structure.
1830 Charles Lyell publishes the first edition of

Principles of Geology, which establishes the
principle of uniformitarianism.
1840 George Everest discovers gravity abnormali-

ties in the Himalayas, leading to develop-
ment of the theory of isostasy.
November 1, 1880 Alfred Wegener is born in Berlin.
1903–04 Scientists discover that radioactive ele-

ments give off heat when they decay and are
common in rocks, providing a new way of
determining the age of rocks and a new heat
source for the earth.
November 24, Wegener earns a Ph.D. in astronomy from

1904 Friedrich Wilhelm University.
1905 Wegener begins working at the Royal Prussian

Aeronautical Observatory in Lindenberg.
1907–08 Wegener is the meteorologist on the

Danmark expedition to Greenland.
1909 Wegener becomes a Privatdozent at

Marburg University.
0
Chronology
1910 Frank Bursley Taylor publishes a theory of

continental drift.
Christmas 1910 Wegener notices that the outlines of Africa

and South America in a friend’s atlas appear
to fit together.
1911 Wegener publishes textbook

Thermodynamics of the Atmosphere.
Fall 1911 Wegener sees a book showing similarity

of fossil animals in West Africa and Brazil;
he begins seeking evidence that Africa and
South America might once have been joined.
January 1912 Wegener gives talks on his continental drift

theory in two scientific meetings.
1912–13 Wegener goes on a second expedition to

Greenland with Johan Peter Koch and two
others.
1913 Wegener marries Else Köppen.
1914 Wegener serves in Belgium during World

War I and is injured twice.
1915 Wegener publishes the first edition of The

Origin of Continents and Oceans.
1918 World War I ends with Germany’s defeat;

Wegener returns to Marburg.
1919 Wegener succeeds Wladimir Köppen

as director of the theoretical meteorol-
ogy department at the German Marine
Observatory and moves to Hamburg.
Alfred Wegener
1920 Wegener publishes the second edition of

The Origin of Continents and Oceans.
1922 Wegener publishes the third edition of The

Origin of Continents and Oceans; the first
reviews of his work in English appear.
1923 South African geologist Alexander du Toit

finds close similarity between rock formations
in South Africa and parts of South America.
1924 Wegener and Wladimir Köppen coauthor

The Climates of the Geological Past; The
Origin of Continents and Oceans is trans-
lated into English for the first time; Wegener
becomes professor of meteorology and geo-
physics at the University of Graz.
November 15, The American Association of Petroleum

1926 Geologists holds a conference on continental
drift in New York, during which most speak-
ers strongly criticize Wegener’s theory.
1929 Wegener publishes the fourth edition of The

Origin of Continents and Oceans.
March–November Wegener, Johannes Georgi, and two others

1929 go to Greenland to make preparations for a
major expedition.
1930 In “Radioactivity and Earth Movements,”

Arthur Holmes explains how convection
currents in a lower layer of the Earth might
make the planet’s crust move.
April 1, 1930 Wegener’s final expedition to Greenland

begins.
June 17, 1930 After a delay of more than a month due to

frozen sea ice, Wegener’s group begins setting
up their West Station.
Chronology
July 30, 1930 Johannes Georgi begins setting up the Mid-

Ice station.
October 30, 1930 Wegener, Fritz Loewe, and Rasmus Villumsen

reach Mid-Ice on a final supply trip.
November 1, 1930 Wegener and Villumsen leave Mid-Ice, plan-

ning to return to West Station.
November 2, 1930 Wegener dies, probably from a heart attack;

Villumsen buries him in the ice and attempts
to continue the journey.
May 8, 1931 A relief party from West Station finds

Wegener’s body.
mid-August, 1931 The Greenland expedition ends.
1930s Felix Vening Meinesz’s measurements of

gravity in the deep sea support the idea
that convection currents in a lower layer
are moving parts of the Earth’s crust; using
undersea seismology, Maurice Ewing shows
that the crust of the seafloor is much thinner
and younger than had been thought.
1932 Bailey Willis suggests that continents were

once joined by “isthmian links,” an alterna-
tive to the continental drift theory.
1937 Alexander du Toit describes his version

of continental drift in Our Wandering
Continents.
1940s, 1950s World War II and the cold war spur military
interest in the deep sea and an explosion of
marine science research.
1944 Arthur Holmes expands on his convection

current theory in an influential textbook,
Principles of Physical Geology.
Alfred Wegener
1952 Marie Tharp suggests that the Mid-Atlantic

Ridge is divided by a rift valley, possibly a
place where the crust was dividing and new
crust was being created.
1955 Stanley Runcorn finds paleomagnetic evi-

dence that the magnetic poles, the conti-
nents, or both have moved in the past.
1955–56 Scripps scientists Ronald Mason and Arthur

Raff find a striped magnetic pattern in sea-
floor rocks around an undersea ridge.
1956–57 Bruce Heezen and Maurice Ewing describe

the mid-ocean ridge system, attracting new
attention to the possibility of continental drift.
1962 Harry Hess publishes his theory of seafloor

spreading.
September 1963 Frederick Vine and Drummond Matthews

propose a theory connecting magnetic
striping to seafloor spreading.
1965 Vine and John Tuzo Wilson publish mag-

netic striping patterns around the Juan de
Fuca Ridge and show that they are similar
to patterns predicted by a computer model
of seafloor spreading; Wilson publishes a
second paper describing how plates in the
Earth’s crust interact and naming a new type
of earthquake fault.
late 1965 Neil Opdyke analyzes magnetic patterns in

sediment cores; Walter Pitman begins analyz-
ing magnetic profiles obtained by the Eltanin.
January 1966 Pitman finds a section of a profile from

Eltanin 19 that shows perfect symmetry on
both sides of an undersea ridge.
Chronology
February 1966 Vine sees the Eltanin 19 profile and realizes

that it offers a major proof of his theory.
late 1966 Lynn Sykes and his coworkers confirm

Wilson’s theory of transform faults; they also
find evidence that a slab of crust is being
pulled into the mantle near Tonga.
April 1966, Three key scientific meetings bring together

November 1966, the lines of research that support the new
April 1967 theory of plate tectonics and convince most
Earth scientists to accept the theory.
1967 Jason Morgan provides a mathematical

model for the movements of crustal plates
on the Earth’s surface.
September 1968 Bryan Isacks, Lynn Sykes, and Jack Oliver

publish a paper describing the theory of
plate tectonics.
1970s Researchers conclude that parts of Hess’s

seafloor spreading theory are too simple;
they discover that plates may sometimes
pick up small pieces of other plates (ter-
ranes) during collisions.
1980 The Alfred Wegener Institute is founded in

Bremerhaven, Germany.
1980s Earth scientists begin to use satellites to

study plate tectonics.
2006 Satellite images show new crust being cre-

ated under Ethiopia.
2007 Ancient rocks from Greenland indicate that

plates were moving 3.8 billion years ago.
Alfred Wegener
2008 Researchers say that plate movement may

have changed its rate of speed or even stopped
at times in the past; they revise ideas about the
way crust moves down into the mantle.
glossary
asthenosphere the layer of Earth’s mantle that lies just below the
lithosphere, extending from about 62 miles (100 km) to 435 miles (700
km) below the planet’s surface; it is solid but soft and can flow like a
thick liquid over geologic time
basalt a dark, fine-grained rock, formed from cooling lava; it is
believed to make up the bulk of the seafloor surface, as well as being
deposited on land by volcanic eruptions
catastrophism the belief that Earth’s past history was marked by
events more violent than any that can be observed today
continental drift Alfred Wegener’s theory that the continents can
move horizontally on the Earth’s surface and had different arrange-
ments in early geologic times than they do now
convection cell a more or less rectangular pattern of upward-moving
and downward-moving convection currents
convection currents currents that cause movement in a liquid when
different parts of the liquid are at different temperatures; heated parts
of the liquid expand and rise, cooler parts shrink and fall
Curie point a temperature point, named after French chemist Pierre
Curie, at which an iron-containing rock becomes magnetized, taking
on the direction and polarity of the Earth’s magnetic field, if the rock
is being cooled; if the rock is being heated, it loses its existing mag-
netic alignment when it passes this temperature
deductive reasoning reasoning from the general to the particular;
for instance, using a theory or hypothesis to make a prediction about
what will happen under particular conditions
density mass per unit of volume
echo sounder a device that identifies objects or surface topography
by sending out sound waves and recording the echoes that bounce off
the object or surface
eon the largest division in the geological timescale; eons, such as the
Proterozoic, are divided into eras

8 Alfred Wegener
epoch the largest division in the paleomagnetic timescale; the scale has
four epochs, named after magnetism pioneers Brunhes, Matuyama,
Gauss, and Gilbert
era the second-largest division in the geological timescale; eras, such
as the Paleozoic, are divided into periods
event a smaller division in the paleomagnetic timescale, represent-
ing a relatively brief change in the Earth’s magnetic field; events are
named after places, such as Jaramillo (in New Mexico)
geodesy the Earth science field that measures the size and shape of
the Earth
geology the Earth science that studies the origin, history, and structure
of the Earth, especially as reflected in the rocks of the planet’s crust
geophysics the Earth science that studies the physical properties of
the Earth
gondwanaland (or gondwana) the name given by Alfred Wegener
and others to a southern supercontinent thought to have existed until
about 145 million years ago; it included what are now Africa, South
America, India, Australia, and Antarctica
granite a common kind of light-colored igneous rock, less dense and
heavy than basalt; rocks related to granite are thought to make up
most of Earth’s landmasses
gravimeter a device that measures minute local variations in the
Earth’s gravity field
guyot a type of flat-topped undersea volcano first identified by Harry
Hess; Hess believed that the tops of the guyots were originally above
water and were worn down by erosion, after which the mountains
slowly sank as a consequence of crustal movement caused by sea-
floor spreading
hypothesis a tentative general statement about the cause or workings
of natural phenomena
igneous rock a rock formed from molten materials that have cooled
and hardened
inductive reasoning reasoning from the particular to the general; for
instance, combining information from a number of observations or
experiments to create a general statement (hypothesis or theory)
isostasy the balance between gravity and buoyancy that adjusts the
height and depth of objects floating in a liquid, particularly portions of
the Earth’s solid crust floating in the liquidlike sima or asthenosphere
glossary 9
lithosphere the Earth’s crust and upper mantle, extending to about 62

miles (100 km) below the surface; it is divided into plates and floats on
the softer asthenosphere
magma molten rock beneath the Earth’s surface
magnetometer a device that can measure local variations in the
Earth’s magnetic field
mantle the layer of the Earth located below the crust, extending
between about 20 miles (33 km) and 1,802 miles (2,900 km) below
the surface
meteorology the Earth science that studies the Earth’s atmosphere
and weather
mid-ocean ridge system a system consisting of parallel ranges of
undersea mountains, with a narrow rift valley between them, that
curves through the center of the world’s oceans like the seam on a
baseball; seafloor spreading and creation of new crust occurs in the
rift valleys
Mohorovicic discontinuity (Moho) the depth (about 5 miles [8 km]
below the ocean floors and an average of 20 miles [32 km] beneath
the continents) at which earthquake waves change velocity abruptly,
marking the boundary between the Earth’s crust and the mantle; it is
named after Croatian seismologist Andrija Mohorovičić
neptunist theory a theory espoused by German geologist Abraham
Gottlob Werner and his followers in the late 18th and early 19th centu-
ries, which stated that most of Earth’s surface features had been shaped
chiefly by currents in the ocean that originally covered the planet
paleoclimatology the Earth science field that studies Earth’s climates
in the geological past
paleontology the Earth science that studies the remains of ancient
living things preserved in rocks (fossils)
Pangaea the name that Alfred Wegener gave to the protocontinent
that, he said, contained all of Earth’s landmasses until about 250 mil-
lion years ago
period the third-largest unit in the geologic timescale; eras are divid-
ed into periods, such as the Jurassic, and periods in turn are divided
into epochs
permanentism the belief, held by many American geologists in the
late 19th century, that the Earth’s continents and oceans have always
occupied approximately the same locations that they have now
0 Alfred Wegener
plate one of a number of solid blocks into which the Earth’s crust is
divided, according to the theory of plate tectonics; the crust is thought
to consist of seven large and about a dozen smaller plates
plate tectonics a theory describing the creation, destruction, and
movements of the Earth’s crust that was proposed in 1967 and quickly
accepted by the Earth science community; it is descended from Alfred
Wegener’s continental drift theory
plutonist theory a theory espoused by James Hutton and his follow-
ers in the early 19th century, which stated that Earth’s surface features
had been shaped chiefly by the planet’s internal heat
Pohlflucht a small force (literally, pole-fleeing force), created by cen-
trifugal force from the Earth’s rotation and by the bulge at the slightly
flattened Earth’s equator, whose increased gravity pulled landmasses
toward it; Alfred Wegener thought that Pohlflucht was one of the
forces that made continents move horizontally
polarity the alignment of a magnet (or iron crystals in magnetic mate-
rial) toward either the north or the south magnetic pole of the Earth;
the polarity of the Earth’s magnetic field has reversed many times in
the geologic past
polar wandering the idea that the Earth’s poles (geological, magnetic,
or both) had different locations during the geological past than they
have now
progressivism the belief that the forces affecting the Earth’s crust in the
geologic past are the same as the forces affecting it now, but those forces
may have acted at different intensities or rates of speed in the past
radioactive decay the breakdown of radioactive forms (isotopes) of
certain elements into nonradioactive elements; this process takes
place at a fixed rate and can therefore be used to determine the age of
materials containing the isotopes
seafloor spreading a theory proposed by Harry Hess in 1960 that
states that new crust is created when molten rock pushes up through
the seafloor at mid-ocean ridges and destroyed when slabs of crust are
pulled down into the mantle at undersea trenches; this process, driven
by convection currents in the mantle, moves the crust of the Earth,
including the continents, as if they were on a conveyor belt
sedimentary rock rock formed by the solidification of particles that
sink to the bottom of oceans
seismograph a device that measures vibrations produced by earth-
quakes or by artificial earthquakes deliberately created by explosions
glossary
seismology the Earth science that studies earthquakes and other

vibrations that move through the layers of the Earth, whether natural
or produced by humans
sial Alfred Wegener’s term for the uppermost layer of the Earth’s
crust, made of granite and similar rocks; sial made up the planet’s
landmasses but formed only a thin layer on the seafloor
sima Alfred Wegener’s term for the layer of crust that lay beneath the
sial; he thought that the sima, though solid, could flow like a liquid over
long periods of time, allowing the continents to move through it
subduction zone a spot where part of a crustal plate is being pulled
down into the mantle at an oceanic trench
terrane a small piece of a crustal plate that is scraped off onto another
plate when the two plates collide; the terrane becomes attached to the
second plate and is carried away with it
theory a general description of the cause or behavior of a group of
phenomena in nature that has been well tested and is usually accepted
as true
thermodynamics the study of heat in relationship to other forms of
energy
transform fault a type of earthquake fault, first described by John
Tuzo Wilson in 1965, that forms when crustal plates slide past each
other; the fault runs perpendicular to the line where the plates scrape
together and is transformed into a ridge or a trench at its ends
uniformitarianism the doctrine, established by Charles Lyell in the
early 19th century, that all forces that affected the Earth in the past
can still be seen in action today; this doctrine is sometimes held to
include the idea that those forces always acted at the same intensity
and rate of speed that they have today
Vine-Matthews-Morley hypothesis the idea, first proposed in 1963,
that the striped patterns of normal and reverse magnetism seen in
rocks around mid-ocean ridges were associated with seafloor spread-
ing; it predicted that the magnetic patterns on the two sides of a ridge
should be mirror images of one another
viscous thick, or resistant to flow (a property of a liquid or a liquidlike
material)
further resourCes
Books
“Alfred Wegener.” In Scientists: Their Lives and Works, Vols. 1–7.
Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale Group, 2006. Available online through
Biography Resource Center. Accessed December 8, 2007.
Brief biography of Wegener, including a description of his conti-
nental drift theory.
du Toit, Alexander. A Geological Comparison of South America with South
Africa. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1927.
Du Toit, an expert in the geology of his native South Africa, notes
many similarities between South African rock formations and
those he observed in parts of South America.
———. Our Wandering Continents: An Hypothesis of Continental
Drifting. London: Oliver & Boyd, 1937.
In this book, du Toit describes his modified version of Alfred
Wegener’s continental drift theory.
Glen, William. The Road to Jaramillo: Critical Years of the Revolution in
Earth Science. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991.
A description of the exciting decade of research (1957–66) that led
to the acceptance of plate tectonics, featuring interviews with the
scientists who carried it out.
Hallam, A. Great Geological Controversies, 2nd ed. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1989.
Includes chapters on neptunism and plutonism, catastrophism and
uniformitarianism, the age of the Earth, and continental drift.
———. A Revolution in the Earth Sciences: From Continental Drift to
Plate Tectonics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.

further resources
Describes Alfred Wegener’s theory of continental drift, contem-

porary reactions to it, and how it evolved into the theory of plate
tectonics, which became widely accepted in the mid-1960s.
Hess, Harry Hammond. “History of the Ocean Basins.” In Petrologic
Studies: A Volume to Honor A. F. Buddington, edited by A. E. J. Engel, H.
L. James, and B. F. Leonard, pp. 599–620. New York: Geological Society
of America, 1962.
Hess’s scientific description of his theory of seafloor spreading,
which he called “an essay in geopoetry.”
Holmes, Arthur. Principles of Physical Geology. New York: Ronald Press,
1946.
Influential textbook that includes Holmes’s version of the conti-
nental drift theory, in which he proposes that parts of the crust are
moved on Earth’s surface by convection currents in the soft layer
underlying the crust.
Lawrence, David M. Upheaval from the Abyss: Ocean Floor Mapping and
the Earth Science Revolution. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University
Press, 2002.
Shows how new discoveries about the ocean floor in the 1950s and
1960s transformed Alfred Wegener’s rejected ideas on continental
drift into the accepted theory of plate tectonics.
LeGrand, H. E. Drifting Continents and Shifting Theories. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Focuses on other scientists’ reactions to the idea of continental drift
and discusses why scientists rejected the theory when Alfred Wegener
proposed it, yet accepted a revised version of it several decades later.
Lyell, Charles. Principles of Geology. New York: Penguin Classics, 1998.
Reissue of the book that established the fundamental geological
principle of uniformitarianism.
Marvin, Ursula B. Continental Drift: The Evolution of a Concept.
Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1973.
Provides an account of the geological discoveries and beliefs
against which Wegener’s continental drift theory was set, as well
as explaining the theory, reactions to it, and the research that
changed Earth scientists’ opinions of it.
Alfred Wegener
McCoy, Roger M. Ending in Ice: The Revolutionary Idea and Tragic

Expedition of Alfred Wegener. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
A biography of Wegener that focuses on his Greenland expeditions,
especially the 1930–31 expedition in which he lost his life.
Oreskes, Naomi, ed. Plate Tectonics: An Insider’s History of the Modern
Theory of the Earth. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2001.
Anthology of articles written by the scientists who took part in the
research that established plate tectonics, describing their work
and feelings.
———. The Rejection of Continental Drift: Theory and Method in
American Earth Science. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Concentrates on beliefs about geology and ways of doing science
held by geologists of Wegener’s time and later; discusses how these
attitudes influenced reactions to his theory.
Runcorn, Stanley, K., ed. Continental Drift. New York: Academic Press,
1962.
Anthology of scientific papers in which Runcorn and other sci-
entists present new evidence that might lead Earth scientists to
reconsider continental drift.
Schwarzbach, Martin, translated by Carla Love. Alfred Wegener: The
Father of Continental Drift. Madison, Wisc.: Science Tech, 1986.
Full-length biography of Alfred Wegener; includes a memoir by
Johannes Georgi and a description of the evolution of continental
drift into plate tectonics by I. Bernard Cohen.
Van der Gracht, W., et al. Theory of Continental Drift: A Symposium on the
Origin and Movement of Land Masses . . . as Proposed by Alfred Wegener.
Tulsa, Okla.: American Association of Petroleum Geologists, 1928.
Collection of papers from an influential 1926 symposium in which
most of the speakers criticized Wegener’s theory, effectively ending
most scientists’ interest in it for more than three decades.
Wegener, Alfred, translated by John Biram. The Origin of Continents
and Oceans. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 1966.
New English translation of the fourth (1929) edition of Wegener’s
book, which describes his theory of continental drift and provides
supporting evidence from a variety of geological specialties.
Wertenbaker, William. The Floor of the Sea: Maurice Ewing and the
Search to Understand the Earth. Boston: Little, Brown, 1974.
further resources
Focuses on the role of Maurice Ewing and the Lamont Geological

Observatory in the deep-sea research that led to the establishment
of plate tectonics.
Yount, Lisa. Modern Marine Science: Exploring the Deep. New York:
Chelsea House, 2006.
For young adults. Includes a chapter on Bruce Heezen, Marie
Tharp, and the discovery of the mid-ocean ridge system and
another chapter on Harry Hess, seafloor spreading, and the devel-
opment of plate tectonics.
Internet Resources
Aber, James S. “Alfred Wegener.” Emporia State University, History of
Geology. Available online. URL: http://academic.emporia.edu/aberjame/
histgeol/wegener/wegener.htm. Accessed December 8, 2007.
Brief biography of Wegener includes contemporary reactions to his
work and a historical assessment.
“The Alfred Wegener Institute.” Alfred Wegener Institute. Last updated
April 25, 2005. Available online. URL: http://www.awi-bremerhaven.
de/AWI. Accessed December 8, 2007.
Brief description of a German institute for polar and marine
research established in 1980 in honor of Alfred Wegener.
“A Brief Introduction to Plate Tectonics, Based on the Work of Alfred
Wegener.” Eastern Illinois University. Available online. URL: http://
www.ux1.eiu.edu/~cfjps/1300/cont_drift.html. Accessed June 3, 2008.
Describes and illustrates the evidence that Alfred Wegener offered
in 1915 to support his theory of continental drift.
Egger, Anne E. “Plate Tectonics I: The Evidence for a Geologic Revolution.”
Visionlearning, 2003. Available online. URL: http://www.visionlearning.
com/library/module_viewer.php?mid=65. Accessed May 4, 2008.
Focuses on the theories that led up to plate tectonics, especially
those of Alfred Wegener, Harry Hess, and Frederick Vine and
Drummond Matthews.
———. “Plate Tectonics II: Plates, Plate Boundaries, and Driving Forces.”
Visionlearning, 2003. Available online. URL: http://www.visionlearning.
com/library/module_viewer.php?mid=66. Accessed May 4, 2008.
Describes the plate tectonics theory, focusing on plate boundaries
and the different ways that plates can interact with one another.
Alfred Wegener
“The History of Continental Drift—Alfred Wegener.” Portsdown,

Moving Continents. Last updated January 29, 2003. Available online.
URL: http://www.bbm.me.uk/portsdown/PH_061_History_b.htm.
Accessed December 8, 2007.
Brief description of Wegener’s life, his theory, the ideas it attempt-
ed to replace, and contemporary scientists’ reactions to it.
“Journey to the Center of the Earth.” Physorg.com. February 21,
2008. Available online. URL: http://www.physorg.com/printnews.
php?newsid=122821057. Accessed May 4, 2008.
A team of British and Swiss scientists have found new information
about the way that pieces of Earth’s crust sink into the mantle.
Kious, W. Jacqueline, and Robert I. Tilling. This Dynamic Earth: The
Story of Plate Tectonics. U.S. Geological Survey. 1996, last updated
January 29, 2001. Available online. URL: http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/
dynamic. Accessed June 3, 2008.
Describes and illustrates the theory of plate tectonics, including
the history of the theory’s development from Alfred Wegener’s
theory of continental drift, and the effects of plate movement on
human society.
“Meteorology—A Brief History.” Florida State University Meteorology
Department. Available online. URL: http://www.met.fsu.edu/explores/
methist.html. Accessed June 3, 2008.
A brief history of meteorology, the science of the atmosphere and
weather, in which Alfred Wegener was a pioneer.
“Plate Tectonics.” Crystalinks. Available online. URL: http://www.
crystalinks.com/platetectonics.html. Accessed May 4, 2008.
Brief, illustrated description of the plate tectonics theory, including
plate boundaries and the ways plates interact. The site also includes
numerous links to current news stories about plate tectonics.
Sandwell, David T., and Walter H. F. Smith. “Exploring the Ocean
Basins with Satellite Altimeter Data.” National Geophysical Data Center,
NOAA Satellite and Information Service. Last modified April 21, 2008.
Available online. URL: http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/bathymetry/
predicted/explore.html. Accessed May 4, 2008.
Describes information related to plate tectonics that has been
obtained through satellites.
“The Story of Plate Tectonics.” Available online. URL: http://www.plate
tectonics.com. Accessed June 3, 2008.
further resources
Site includes a description of plate tectonics as well as an archive

of articles and a book on the subject.
Periodicals
“Earth’s Moving Crust May Occasionally Stop.” Space Daily, January 10,
2008, n.p.
Two researchers conclude that plate movement may have occurred
at different rates during different parts of the geologic past, some-
times even stopping entirely.
Ewing, Maurice, and Bruce C. Heezen. “Mid-Atlantic Ridge Seismic Belt.”
Transactions of the American Geophysical Union 37 (1956), 343 ff.
Scientific paper showing that the epicenters of earthquakes in the
Atlantic Ocean lie along the center of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
“Finding Evidence of First Plate Tectonics.” Space Daily, March 26,
2007, n. p.
Identification of the oldest preserved pieces of Earth’s crust in
southern Greenland offers evidence that the continents were mov-
ing 3.8 billion years ago, very early in the planet’s history.
Hamilton, Warren. “Plate Tectonics—Its Influence on Man.” California
Geology 31 (October 1978): n.p. Also available online. URL: http://www.
johnmartin.com/earthquakes/eqpapers/00000037.htm. Accessed June
8, 2008.
Describes concepts and development of the plate tectonics theory
and the effects of plate movement on human society, for instance
through deposition of valuable minerals and fossil fuels and, more
negatively, through earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
Hughes, Patrick. “The Meteorologist Who Started a Revolution.”
Weatherwise 51 (January–February 1998): 38–41.
Recounts Wegener’s theory and explains why geologists and geo-
physicists of his time rejected it.
“In the Land of Death, Scientists Witness the Birth of a New Ocean.”
Guardian, November 2, 2006, n.p. Available online. URL: http://www.
crystalinks.com/platetectonics.html. Accessed May 4, 2008.
The European Space Agency’s Envisat satellite has spotted a huge
rift opening beneath the Afar region of war-torn Ethiopia. The
Nubian and Arabian tectonic plates are separating at this spot to
create what will eventually be a new ocean.
8 Alfred Wegener
Isacks, Bryan, Jack Oliver, and Lynn Sykes. “Seismology and the New
Global Tectonics.” Journal of Geophysical Research 73 (September
1967): 5,855–5,899.
First complete scientific summary of the theory of plate tectonics.
Lawrence, David M. “Mountains under the Sea.” Mercator’s World 4
(November 1999): 36 ff.
Focuses on Marie Tharp’s ocean maps and her discovery of the rift
valley within the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
Pitman, W. C., III, and J. R. Heirtzler. “Magnetic Anomalies over the
Pacific-Antarctic Ridge.” Science 154 (December 2, 1966): 1,164–1,171.
Describes the Eltanin 19 magnetic profile, whose perfect symmetry
on the two sides of the ridge provided outstanding support for the
seafloor spreading theory.
Raff, A. D., and R. G. Mason. “Magnetic Survey off the West Coast of
North America 32° N. Latitude to 42° N. Latitude.” Geological Society of
America Bulletin 72 (1961): 1,267–1,270.
First paper describing a striped pattern of magnetism in rocks
around a mid-ocean ridge; such striping was later shown to reflect
reversals in the Earth’s magnetic field combined with creation of
new crust through seafloor spreading.
Vine, F. J. “Spreading of the Ocean Floor: New Evidence.” Science 154
(December 16, 1966): 1,405–1,415.
Vine cites three independent confirmations of the Vine-Matthews-
Morley theory: the magnetic profile he and John Tuzo Wilson took
at the Juan de Fuca Ridge, the Eltanin 19 profile, and the magnetic
profiles from Neil Opdyke’s sediment cores.
———, and D. H. Matthews. “Magnetic Anomalies over Oceanic Ridges.”
Nature 199 (September 1963): 947–949.
Scientific paper showing how the existence of stripes of rocks with
different magnetic alignments on the seafloor supports the theory
of seafloor spreading.
———, and John Tuzo Wilson. “Magnetic Anomalies over a Young
Oceanic Ridge off Vancouver Island.” Science 150 (October 22, 1965):
485–489.
In this paper, Vine and Wilson report a striped pattern of magne-
tism in seafloor rocks that supports the Vine-Matthews theory.
further resources 9
Wilson, John Tuzo. “A New Class of Faults and Their Bearing on

Continental Drift.” Nature 207 (July 4, 1965): 343–347.
Wilson pictures the Earth’s crust as being divided into rigid plates.
He describes the plates’ interaction and names a new kind of
earthquake fault, the transform fault, which is formed when plates
slide past one another.
inDex
Italic page numbers American Philosophical atmosphere, Earth’s
indicate illustrations Society 65 21–24, 28–29
Ampferer, Otto 91 Australia 33, 44, 50, 50,
A anemometer 22 52, 53, 64
Across the White Antarctica 2, 44, 50, 51, Australian brushtail
Wilderness (Koch and 78, 84, 114 possum 52
Wegener) 36 Appalachian Mountains Austria 31, 59–60, 91
Afar region 125 48
Africa 11, 44, 50, 64 Arabian plate 125 B
similarity in outline Archaean eon 40 Bacon, Roger 33
to South America Archimedes 13 Ballard, Robert 103
31–33, 32, 128 Arctic 25–26 ballooning 24–25
age of Earth 3–4, 6, 10, modern research in balloons, weather
16–18, 40 78, 84 24–26, 25, 70, 75
ages 40 travel techniques 35, barometer 22
air pressure 22, 28 71, 73, 76, 77, 78 Barrell, Joseph 90
air travel 71 Arctic Ocean 44 basalt 47, 92, 97, 103
Airy, George Biddell Argand, Émile 60 bats 99
13–15 Argentina 48, 93 Beagle, HMS 9
Airy isostasy 13–15, 14, Aristarchus of Samos Becquerel, Henri 17
96 1 Behn, Mark 124
Alfonsine Tables Aristotle 1, 3, 22 Belgium 37
22–23 Asia 41, 42, 43, 50, 64 Benndorf, Hans 37, 128
Alfonso X 22 Asia Minor 55 Berlin 21–22, 36
Alfred Wegener: Father asthenosphere 90, Berlin, University of 21,
of Continental Drift 107–108, 108, 116, 23
(Schwarzbach) 21, 26, 120 Berry, Edward 67
70 astronomy 22–24, 29 Bethlehem
Alfred Wegener Institute Atlantic Ocean 42, (Pennsylvania) 97
84 43–44, 59, 102, 125 Bible 68
Alps 21, 43, 60, 65 North Atlantic 11, Bitterfeld 24
Alvin 98 48, 71, 99, 101 Bjerknes, Vilhelm 23
American Association of shape of basin 31, Blackett, P. M. S. 104
Petroleum Geologists 32 Borg 36
62 Atlantis (Plato’s) 3 Bowie, William 15, 63
American Geophysical Atlantis (protocontinent) Brazil 33, 48, 51, 93
Union 101, 103, 119 11, 33 Bremerhaven 84
150
Index 151
Britain 51, 64 centrifugal force 56 evidence supporting

reaction to Ceylon 53 from scientists in
continental drift Challenger expedition 1920s to 1950s
theory 60–62 95, 101 90–93, 95–96, 101,
British Columbia 111 Chamberlin, Rollin T. 103–105
Brittany 48 65, 69 from scientists in
Brongniart, Alexandre Chesapeake Bay 4 1960s 106–119
7 Chicago, University of from Wegener 45–55
Brunhes, Bernard 110 65 first presentation 35
Buckland, William 8 China 49, 55 origin 31–33
Buenos Aires 48–49 chrons 40 relationship to plate
Buffon, comte de climates 23–24, 31, 78, tectonics theory
(Georges Leclerc) 84 xv–xvi, 121–123,
2–6, 12 past (“fossil”) 53–55, 127, 129
59, 78 supporters 89–93,
C zones 31 95, 101, 104
Calcutta 13–14 Climates of the continental shelves 99
Caledonian Mountains Geological Past, The continental tables 46
48, 61 (Köppen and Wegener) continents 99, 120
California, University of 31, 59 ancient ideas about 2
97–98 climatology 27, 30–31 climates, ancient
Cambrian period 40 coal 53–55 53–55
Cambridge University cold war, influence on development of 2–3,
62, 104, 109–110, 118 marine science 97 11
Canada 44, 48, 61 Cöllnische Gymnasium forces producing
Cape Johnson 109 21 movement 55–57,
Cape Mountains 48–49 Columbia University 61, 63–64, 91–93,
Carboniferous period 96–99 107–108, 108, 116
33, 40, 54–55, 61 comet 3, 43 horizontal
Caribbean 95 compass needles 103, movement of 33,
Carl Ritter Medal 36 110 41–44, 42, 45–46,
Carlsberg Ridge 109 Continental Drift: The 48–49, 61–62. See
Carnegie Institution of Evolution of a Concept also continental
Washington 92, 124 (Marvin) 69, 94 drift theory
Castile 22 continental drift theory rocks of 47
catastrophism 10–11, (Taylor) 43–44 vertical movement of
17, 44, 68 continental drift theory 11–13, 33, 94
Catherine II the Great (Wegener) convection currents
(czarina of Russia) 30 breakup of within Earth
Celsius, Anders 22 protocontinents as force behind
Celsius (centigrade) 41–44, 42 continental drift
scale 22–23 criticism of xv–xvi, 56, 91, 91–93, 95
Cenozoic era 40, 44 60–69, 94, 101, 128 in plate tectonics
Central Indian Ridge defined xiv–xv, 107–108, 116, 121,
102 38–39 123
152 Alfred Wegener
Copenhagen 73, 75 dating of rocks 18, 40, heating through

Copernicus, Nicolaus xv 103, 110 radioactive decay
Copley Medal 9 Deccan areas (India) 54 17–18, 39
Cox, Allan 110–111, deductive reasoning layers 2–3, 12–16,
113, 115 66–67 46–48
Creation and Its Denmark 24 magnetic field 103,
Mysteries Unveiled Descartes, René 2–3, 110–113
(Snider-Pellegrini) 33 11–12, 43 rotation 1, 43, 56, 92
Cretaceous period 40, Devonian period 40 shape 43, 56
43–44, 54 diamonds 48 shrinking over time
Croatia 16 Dickens, Charles 20 2, 11–12, 18, 39,
crust, Earth’s Dietz, Robert 106 43, 90, 122
creation 5–6, 101, Disko 73 Earth Institute 97
107, 108, 120, 125 Djibouti 125 earthquakes 9–10, 96,
cyclical changes in 5, Doell, Richard 110–111, 121, 125
7, 10–12, 106–108, 115 faults 50, 105,
118, 120 dogs and dogsleds 35, 77 116–117, 119, 124
destruction 108, Drifting Continents shock waves given
118, 120, 123–124 and Shifting Theories off by 16, 46
heat, internal, effect (LeGrand) 66, 122 artificial 71–72,
on 5 Durham, University 96–97
layers 2–3, 5, 46–48, of 90 to identify layers in
61, 63, 90, 97 du Toit, Alexander 43, Earth’s crust 16,
movement 92–93, 92–94 47, 97, 120
107–109, 108, 111– Dutton, Clarence 14–15 undersea 101,
112, 117–118, 120 116–118
plates in 116–121, E earthworms 51
121, 123–125 Earth East Africa 49, 101
water, effect on 5 age 3–4, 6, 16–18, East Pacific Rise 102,
Cuba 59 40, 90 115, 117
Curie, Marie 17 ancient theories East Station 75, 86, 87
Curie, Pierre 17, 103 about 1–2 echo sounding of
Curie point 103 atmosphere 21–24, seafloor 96, 98–101,
Cuvier, Georges 7, 10 28–29 109
Cynognathus 50 catastrophes eclipses 1
affecting 7, 10–11 Edinburgh
D circumference, Royal Society 6
Dalrymple, Brent ancient calculation University 6, 90
110–111, 115 of 2 Eierman (police officer)
Daly, Reginald A. 90, 92, climates 30–31 21
94 cooling over time Elements of Geology
Dana, James D. 12, 41 2–3, 11, 14–15, (Lyell) 8
Danmark expedition 17–18, 39, 43, 124 elephants, fossil 3
25–27, 35, 45 development, Élie de Beaumont,
Darwin, Charles 9, 16, theories about Léonce 7
68 2–7, 9–12 Eltanin 114–115
Index 153
Eltanin 19 magnetic Fahrenheit scale 22 Geological Society of

profile 114–117 Ficker, Heinrich von 89 America 44
Emergency Aid Finland 15, 73 Geological Society of
Committee for Fisher, Osmond 18 America Bulletin 44,
German Science 71, flood myth 68 105
73 Floor of the Sea, The Geological Society of
Ending in Ice (McCoy) 113–114, 119 London 8–9
30 fossils 3 Geological Survey of
Envisat 125 marine, on land 3, 4, France 65
eons 40 5, 12 geologic time (table)
Eötvös, Loránd 56 similarity in widely 40
epochs 40, 110 separated sites 11, geology
Epochs of Nature 33, 39, 50–53, 50, changed by plate
(Buffon) 3 64, 122 tectonics 122
eras 40 use in geological early history of xvi,
Eratosthenes of Cyrene dating 4, 7, 113, 1–3
1–2 120 early 20th-century
Eritrea 125 Foster, John 113 18–19, 39
erosion 5–7, 16, 109 France 48, 65 evidence supporting
Ethiopia 125 Frankfurt 35 continental drift
events (in magnetic Franklin, Benjamin 24 from 48–50
timeline) 110 Freiburg 5 19th-century 3–17,
Everest, George 12–13, Freuchen, Peter 72 120
95, 125 friction 56–57 “Geophysical Basis
Euler’s theorem 118 Friedrich Wilhelm of the Evolution . . .”
Europe 32, 45 University 21 (Wegener talk) 35
ancient connection geophysics 15, 18, 33,
to North America G 41, 98, 122
41, 44, 48, 51 Geiger, Rudolf 31 support for
scientists’ reaction geodesy 45–46, 64, 94 continental drift
to continental drift Geographical 78 theory from
theory 60, 66 geography, ancient ideas 46–48
weather and climate about 2 Georgi, Johannes 26,
55, 71 Geological Association 28, 36, 59, 72
European Space Agency (Germany) 35, 36 as Wegener’s student
125 Geological Comparison 29
evolution by natural of South America with on Wegener’s
selection 9, 68 South Africa, A (du third Greenland
Ewing, William Maurice Toit) 93 expedition
(“Doc”) 96, 97–101, Geological Evidences of at Mid-Ice station
103, 109 the Antiquity of Man 75–77, 80–81,
(Lyell) 8 83–85, 88
F Geological Institute of planning and
Face of the Earth, The Neuchâtel 60 preparing 70–73
(Suess) 11 Geological Magazine 3, German Marine
Fahrenheit, Gabriel 22 60 Observatory 30, 58, 70
154 Alfred Wegener
glaciers 9, 15, 35, 54–55, movement of 45–46, heat as shaper of Earth’s

54, 61, 78 64, 94 crust 5–6
glaciology 36 Wegener’s first heather 51
Glen, William 114–115 expedition to Heezen, Bruce 100,
global warming 78, 84 25–29, 87 100–101, 103, 106,
Glossopteris 50, 61 Wegener’s second 108, 114
Goddard Institute for expedition to Heidelberg, University
Space Studies 119 35–36, 54, 87 of 21, 30
Godhavn 85 Wegener’s third Heirtzler, James
Gonds 11 expedition to 115–116
Gondwanaland (or 70–88, 87 Herron, Ellen 114
Gondwana) 11, 42, planning and Hess, Harry 103, 107,
43–44, 50–51, 53–55, preparation 115, 118, 120
92–93, 104 70–73 seafloor spreading
Gordon Bennett setting up Mid-Ice theory 91,
Contest for Free 75–77 106–110, 123
Balloons 24 setting up West Himalayas 12–13,
granite 47, 92 Station 73–76 43–44, 49
gravimeter 95 Wegener’s death “History of the Ocean
gravity 82–86 Basins” 106
as force to move Wegener’s visit to Holmes, Arthur 90–95,
crust 123 Mid-Ice 79–83 107
law of 56 Greenwich 46 Hooke, Robert 22
measurements in Gregory, J. W. 64 “Horizontal
geology 12–13, Grossborstel 28 Displacement of
95–96, 98, 108, Guardian 125 the Continents”
125 Gulf of Mexico 95 (Wegener) 35
Graz, Austria 31, 60, Gustav Holm 73, 74 Horner, Mary 8
84 Guyot, Arnold Henry Humboldt, Alexander
Graz, University of 109 von 20, 26, 33
59–60 guyots 109 humidity 23
Great Geological Hutton, James 5–7, 6,
Controversies (Hallam) H 9–10, 16
xv Hadean eon 40 hydrophone 97
Greeks, ancient, theories Hallam, Anthony xv, hygrometer 23
about Earth 1–2 93, 120, 123, 129 hypotheses in science
Greenland xv–xvi, Hamburg, Germany 28, 66–67
25–26, 32, 44, 87, 125 30, 58–59, 70
climate and weather, Hamburg, University of I
studies of 26, 36, 59 icebergs 48, 71, 99
70–71, 76, 78, Handbook of Iceland 35, 54, 70, 73, 87
80–81, 83–84 Climatology (Köppen ice sheet 53, 78
geodesic and Geiger) 31 European, melting of
measurements in Harvard University 90, 15
45–46, 64, 94 94 Greenland 26, 35,
ice sheet 26, 35, 70– Hawaii 104 70–72, 74–76, 78,
72, 74–76, 78, 96 Hayford, John 15 96
Index 155
igneous rocks 103 Jurassic period 40, 41, land bridges 33, 39, 41,
Illustrations of the 53, 54 50–51, 53, 94
Huttonian Theory of Jutland 24 landmasses 107 See
the Earth (Playfair) also continents
6 K forces causing
India 11, 12, 43–44, 50, Kamarujuk fjord 71, 74 movement 55–57,
53–54 Karoo formation 92 63–64, 91–93, 123
Indian Ocean 44, 109 kelp 98 horizontal movement
Indonesia 95–96 Kelvin, Lord (William 45–46, 90
inductive reasoning Thomson) 16–18 vertical movement
66–67 Kerner-Marilaun, Fritz 2–3, 5, 11–16, 39,
Innsbruck, University 60 90, 94
of 21 kimberlite 48 latitude 45–46
interdisciplinary King’s College, London Laurasia 42, 43, 93
approach in science 8 lava 47, 101, 110, 113
45, 122 Kinnordy 8 Lawrence, David M. 111
International kites in meteorology Leclerc, Georges (comte
Astronomical Union 24, 26 de Buffon) 2–6
84 Knight’s Cross of the Leeds, University of 125
International Council Order of Danebrog 36 LeGrand, H. E. 66, 68,
for Science 78 Koch, Johan Peter 122
International Polar Year 35–36, 54 Lehigh University 97
78 Kopp, Walthar 75 Leipzig, University of
Inuit 26, 35, 86 Köppen, Else See 30
Ireland 48, 94 Wegener, Else Le Pichon, Xavier
iron 47, 103 (Köppen) 118–119
Isacks, Bryan 118, 119 Köppen, Marie 58 lightning 24
islands 49, 91, 117– Köppen, Wladimir Lindenberg 24
118, 120 27–28, 30–31, 34, 53, Linnean Society 8
isostasy 14, 14–15, 39, 58–60, 65, 73 lithosphere 90, 108, 120
41, 47–48, 95 Krabbe 74 lodestone 103, 110
Airy 13–15, 14, 96 Kraus 85 Loewe, Fritz 71–72,
Pratt 14, 14–15, 96 Kuhlbrodt, Erich 59 75–76, 79–83
isthmian links 94 London, England 60
L longitude 45–46, 64,
J Labrador 51 94
Jamieson, T. F. 15 La Jolla 97 Longwell, Chester 63,
Japan 124 Lake, Philip 60–61, 64 69
Jeffreys, Harold 62 Lamont, Thomas W. 98 Lyell, Charles 8–10, 9,
jet stream 70 Lamont-Doherty Earth 12, 16, 68
Johns Hopkins Observatory 97–98 Lystrosaurus 50
University 67 Lamont-Doherty
Jones, T. Rupert 3 Geological M
Journal of Geophysical Observatory 98 Madagascar 53
Research 120 Lamont Earth magma 107, 113, 125
Juan de Fuca Ridge 102, Observatory 96–100, “Magnetic Anomalies
111, 114, 116 113–116, 118 over Oceanic Ridges”
156 Alfred Wegener
(Vine and Matthews) Mather, F. K. 128 caused by

110 Matthews, Drummond continental
magnetic field, Earth’s, 110, 115 movement 43–44,
changes in 103–104, Matuyama, Motonori 49, 63, 91, 117
110–113 110 gravity effects
magnetic poles, Earth’s McCoy, Roger 30 12–13
103–104, 110 McKenzie, Dan 118 Mylius-Erichsen, Ludvig
magnetic striping Mediterranean region 25–26, 35
around undersea ridges 43
104–105, 109–116, Menard, William 97 N
112, 118 mesosaurs 50–51 Namaland 93
magnetism Mesozoic era 40, 41, 43 Nansen, Fridtjof 25
in rocks 47, 103, 104, Meteor 95 National Aeronautics
110 meteorites 40 and Space
in seafloor 98–99, Meteorologica Administration 119
109–116, 118 (Aristotle) 22 National Science
magnetite 103 meteorology xv, 21–24, Foundation (U.S.)
magnetometer 104, 29, 58–60, 65, 98 97–98
109 meteors 22, 59 Nature 110
Malay Archipelago 50, Mexico 59 Neogene period 40
53 Mid-Atlantic Ridge 44, neptunist theory 5–6
mammoths 7 101, 102, 116–117 “New Class of Faults
mantle 16, 103, 118, 120, Mid-Ice station 72, and Their Bearing on
124 74–77, 79–88, 81, 87 Continental Drift”
as source of new mid-ocean ridges 94, (Wilson) 116
crust 101, 107, 98, 100–103, 102, Newfoundland 48, 51,
108 107–119, 108, 112 94
convection currents Mid-Pacific Ridge 98 Newton, Isaac 56
in 91, 93, 121, 123 Mohorovičić, Andrija 16 New York City 62
mapping of seafloor Mohorovicic nife 15
98–101, 109, 125 discontinuity (Moho) North America 32, 55,
Marburg 27, 35, 58 16 61
University of 28 Montgolfier, Jacques 24 formerly joined to
Mariana Islands 124 Montgolfier, Joseph 24 Europe 41, 51
Marine Biological Morgan, Jason 118–119, plants and animals in
Association of San 119 51, 53, 64
Diego 98 Morley, Lawrence 111 rock formations in
Marine Biological Morse, Samuel F. B. 23 48–49
Laboratory 98 Moon 1, 40, 43–44, northern lights 27, 35
marine science, growth 46, 84 North Pole 53–55
in 1940s and 1950s craters, origin of 59 Norway 54
97–99 mountains Nubian plate 125
marsupials 52–53 distribution 18, 39
Marvin, Ursula B. 69, 84 formation 5, 7, O
Mason, Ronald 10–11, 18, 39, 94, objectivity in science
104–105, 109–110 123 61, 93
Index 157
Office of Naval peat beds 53 Principia Philoosophae

Research 97–98, 106 perch 51 (Descartes) 2
Oliver, Jack 116, 119 periods 40 Principles of Geology
On the Origin of Species permanentism 12, 41, (Lyell) 8, 10
(Darwin) 16 94 Principles of Physical
Opdyke, Neil 113–115 Permian period 40, 50, Geology (Holmes) 91
opossums 52, 53 54–55, 61 progressivism 11–12
Ordovician period 40 Persia 61 Proterozoic eon 40,
Oreskes, Naomi 64, 122 Phanerozoic eon 40 104
Origin of Continents Pitman, Walter C., III protocontinents 41–44,
and Oceans, The 113–116 42
(Wegener) xvi, 38, 41 plate tectonics theory Ptolemy 2
Our Mobile Earth 120–125, 121, 127
(Daly) 90 acceptance by Earth Q
Our Wandering science community Quaternary period 40
Continents (du Toit) 119–123, 129 Queen Elisabeth
93 continental drift, Grenadier Guards 37
Oxford University 8 relationship to
xv–xvi, 121–123, R
P 127, 129 radioactive decay 17–19,
Pacific Antarctic Ridge mathematical 39–40, 90–91, 93, 103,
102, 114 support for 110
Pacific Ocean 49, 55, 118–119 “Radioactivity and Earth
95, 102, 109 modifications since Movements”(Holmes)
paleoclimatology 31, 1970 123–125 91
45, 59–60, 78 revolutionary nature radiotelegraphy 46, 64
evidence supporting of 120, 122 radium 17
continental drift summarized 120, Raff, Arthur 104–105,
from 53–55 121 109–110
Paleogene period 40 Plato 3 Raymond, Percy E. 94
paleomagnetism 103, Playfair, John 6, 10 reasoning, inductive
110, 128 Pleistocene 94 and deductive 66–67
paleontology 11, 45, 64, plutonist theory 5–6 Red Sea 125
94 Pohlflucht 57, 62–63 Rejection of Continental
evidence supporting Polar Bear 76 Drift, The (Oreskes)
continental drift polar wandering 53–55, 64
from 50–53 104 religion, conflict with
Paleozoic era 11, 33, 40, Pole Star 84 science 68
41 ponies, Icelandic 35 Revolution in the Earth
Pamir plateau 44 potassium-argon dating Sciences, A (Hallam)
Pangaea 41, 42, 43, 64, 110 93, 120, 123, 129
68, 93, 125 Pratt, John Henry 13–15 Reykjavik 73, 87
Pangaea Ultima 125 Pratt isostasy 14, rift valleys 49, 101, 125
Panthalassa 41, 42 14–15, 96 in mid-ocean ridges
parasites 53 Princeton University 100–101, 107
pearl mussels 51 103, 107, 109, 118–119 Ring of Fire 49
158 Alfred Wegener
Road to Jaramillo, The science mapping 98,

114 change in xiv–xv 100–101, 109, 125
Rockefeller Foundation interdisciplinary movement 107–
98 approach to 45, 109, 108, 111–112,
rock formations, similar, 122 112
in widely separated objectivity in 61, 93 sediment cores from
sites 48–49, 61, 90, 92, philosophies of 98, 113–114
122 66–69 seismology
Ronaldshay, earl of reasoning in 66–67 measurements
61–62 religion, conflict 98–101, 116, 119
Royal Geographical with 68 seafloor spreading
Society (England) Science (magazine) 106–109, 108, 111,
60–61, 78 116 114–116, 118, 123
Royal Medal 9 Scopes, John 68 seawater
Royal Prussian Scopes trial 68 composition 98
Aeronautical Scoresby Sound 75, 87 currents 98
Observatory 24–25 Scotese, Christopher Sedgwick, Adam 6
Royal Society (England) 125 sedimentary rocks 103,
8–9, 13 Scotland 48, 61 113
Royal Society of Scripps, E. W. 98 seismic waves 46–47
Edinburgh 6 Scripps Institution for artificial 71–72,
Runcorn, Stanley K. 104 Biological Research 96–97
Ruprecht Karl 98 seismograph 71, 96, 101,
University 21 Scripps Institution of 117
Russia 61 Oceanography 97–99, seismology 16
Rutherford, Ernest 104, 125 seafloor 96–101,
17–18 seafloors 63–64, 78, 92 116–118
age 97, 109 “Seismology and the
S as sites of formation New Global Tectonics”
sago palms 54 of new crust 101, (Isacks, Sykes, Oliver)
sal 15–16, 47 107, 108 120
San Andreas Fault 101 composition 47, 56, sial 47–48, 63, 97
satellites in plate 97 Siberia 7, 61
tectonics research dredge samples from Sierra de la Ventana
125 95, 98 48–49
Saussure, Horace de 23 early research on 95 Silurian period 40
Saxony 5 echo sounding Silver, Paul 124
Scandinavia 15, 25, 48, measurements 96, sima 15–16, 47–49, 56,
54 98–100 63, 91–92
Schindler Orphanage gravity sledges, motorized 71,
20 measurements 98, 73, 75–77, 85
Schuchert, Charles 108 Smithsonian Institution
64–65 magnetism 23
Schwarzbach, Martin measurements snails 51
21, 26, 29, 30, 59, 70 98–99, 104–105, Snider-Pellegrini,
Schwinner, Robert 91 109–116, 112 Antonio 33
Index 159
Snow Sparrow 76 Sykes, Lynn 116–118, trenches, ocean 50, 95,

Society for the 120 108, 116–119
Advancement of Trewartha, Glen 31
Natural Science 35 T Triassic period 40, 50
Soddy, Frederick 17 Taylor, Frank Bursley
solar system 40 43–44, 62 U
sonar 98 telegraph 23 Umanak Bay 71, 87
Sorge, Ernst 71–73, 72, Tennessee 68 uniformitarianism
77, 80–81, 83, 85 Termier, Pierre 65 8–12, 18, 68, 120
Source Book of Geology, terranes 123–124 United States, reaction
The (Mather) 128 Tertiary period 16, 40, to Wegener’s ideas in
South Africa 48–51, 53, 54–55, 104 62–69, 94
54, 61, 90, 92–93 Tethys 1 Upheaval from the
South America 11, 44, Texas, University of 125 Abyss (Lawrence) 111
125 Tharp, Marie 100–101, Urania Society 22
fossils 50, 52–53, 103, 114 uranium 17
64 theories in science 67, Uruguay 93
rock formations 49, 123 U.S. Coast and Geodetic
61, 90, 92–93 “Theory of Continental Survey 63
similarity in outline Drift: A Symposium . . .” U.S. Geological Survey
to Africa 31–33, (meeting) 62–69 43
32, 128 Theory of the Earth with Ussher, James 4
Southeast Indian Ridge Proofs and Illustrations Uvkusigsat 73
102 (Hutton) 6
South Pacific 53, 118 thermodynamics, laws V
South Pole 53–55 of 17 Varley, Martin 78
Southwest Indian Ridge Thermodynamics Vatnajökull (Icelandic
102 of the Atmosphere glacier) 35, 54, 87
Soviet Union 97 (Wegener) 27–30 vegetation, relationship
Space Daily 124 thermometer 22, 24 to climate 31
Spitsbergen 54 Thomson, William Vening Meinesz, Felix
Stanford University (Lord Kelvin) 16–17 A. 95–96, 108, 125
63 Tian Shan range 49 Villumsen, Rasmus
Staudigel, Hubert 125 tides, effect on Earth’s 79–80, 82, 83, 85–86
St. Petersburg, crust 43, 56, 62–63 Vine, Frederick
University of 30 tillites 53 109–116, 118, 120
strata 7, 93, 120 Tonga 118, 124 Vine-Matthews-Morley
subduction zones 118, Toronto, University of hypothesis 111,
123–124 111, 117 114–115
submarine warfare 97, Torricelli, Evangelista 22 viscous liquid, sima as
99, 104 Transactions of the 47–48, 63
Suess, Eduard 11–12, Geological Society of volcanoes 5, 7, 9–10,
15, 43–44, 47, 92, 94 Glasgow 91 49, 59, 96
Sun 3 transform faults at plate borders 117,
Sunda Islands 53 116–119 121, 125
Switzerland 60 Transvaal 93 in island arcs 49
160 Alfred Wegener
undersea 101, 103, third expedition West Station 73–77,

109 to 70–88, 87 79–80, 82–88, 87
Hamburg, career in Whewell, William 10
W 58–60 Willis, Bailey 63, 94
water as shaper of Marburg, career in Wilson, John Tuzo xv,
Earth’s crust 5 29–30 111, 114, 116–118, 117,
Waterschoot van der memorials 84, 86, 88, 120
Gracht, W. A. J. M. van 89 wind speed 22, 24
62–63 other scientists’ Wisconsin, University of
weather, study and opinions of xv, 31
prediction of 22–24, 65–68, 128 Wollaston Medal 9
71 World War I military Woods Hole,
Wegener, Alfred Lothar service 36–37 Massachusetts 97–98
27, 29, 34, 36, 59, 79, 82 youth 20–21 Woods Hole
continental drift Wegener, Anna Oceanographic
theory See also (Schwarz) 20–21 Institution 97–99,
continental drift Wegener, Charlotte 58 124
theory Wegener, Else (Köppen) World Meteorological
criticism of 60–69 27, 28–29, 31–32, 34, Organization 78
defined xiv–xv, 36, 58, 60 World War I 36–37, 58,
38–39 Wegener, Hilde 36 99, 104
first presentation 35, Wegener, Käthe 58 World War II 109
43 Wegener, Kurt 21, echo sounding in 99
origin 31–33 23–25, 34, 36, 38, 58, influence on marine
death 82–86 88 science 97, 104
early career in Wegener, Richard Worzel, J. Lamar 99
meteorology 24 20–21 Worzel, Joe 115
education 21–23 Wegener, Tony 21, 34 Wright, Frederick E. 92
evaluation of Wegener, Wilhelm 20 Wright, Tim 125
128–129 Weiken, Karl 75–76, Wundt, W. 128
Graz, career in 60 85–86
Greenland Werner, Abraham Y
first expedition Gottlob 5–6 Yale University 12, 63,
to 25–29, 87 Wertenbaker, William 64, 90
second expedition 113–114, 116–119
to 35–36, 36, West Africa 33 Z
54, 87 Westminster Abbey 9 Zechlinerhütte 21

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Alfred

Copyright © 2009 by Lisa Yount

library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data

You can find Chelsea House on the World Wide Web at

Text design by Kerry Casey

Printed in the United States of America

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

1 Changing Views of the Earth

4 “Utter, Damned Rot”

5 Death on the Ice

Conclusion: Reaching into the Future 127

S cience is, above all, a great human adventure. It is the process of

expeditions to the ocean floor; biologist Jonas Salk established the

E verything changes. As time passes, Earth and everything on it

Revolution in Earth Science

tectonics “one of the most fascinating and best documented [stories] in

P art of being human has always been to wonder . . . to ask ques-

Earth’s Early Days

from Abraham Gottlob Werner (1749–1817), a respected professor

Hutton presented his ideas to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in

those of which we know the principle, and no extraordinary events

Catastrophes or Steady Change?

✹ Charles lyell (1797–1875):

He also published travel books about his trips to North America in

occurred at many different times, probably in sudden bursts of activ-

Floating in a Hidden Sea

the crust by different rates of expansion and contraction during the

achieve a balance between the force of gravity, which pushes them

The Age of the Earth

Since radioactive decay takes place at steady, measurable rates

Earth Science in Turmoil

The discovery of radioactivity had recently hit the Earth sciences

of military service. He then began graduate studies in astronomy,

✹ meteorology: The science of weather

Wegener received his Ph.D. from the University of Berlin on

freezing point of water as 0° and the boiling point of water as 100°.)

installations at observatories can lead to new discoveries; and

and then back to a more southerly part of central Germany near

that expeditions there are not worthwhile. If he could have

Popular Teacher and Writer

In 1909, Alfred Wegener became a Privatdozent at the University of Marburg, shown

other variables, such as air pressure and moisture, in the Earth’s

✹ wladimir köppen (1846–1940):

in a modiﬁed form. He recognized that climate determined what

During the next few months, Wegener gathered information

Wegener first presented his proposal in two speeches given

Love and War

Much of Wegener’s work on this expedition, he said later, con-

a reserve lieutenant in the Queen Elisabeth Grenadier Guards’ Third

As an alternative to the theory of sinking land bridges, Wegener

Y Another “Continental Drift” Theory

(continued from previous page)

not name these continents, but for the southern protocontinent,

day, an essential part of the calculations, by referring to charts of

Two Layers of Crust

waves travel through different kinds of rock at different speeds. They

To Wegener, these detailed matches in rock formations pro-

shows earthquake faults and, often, deep ocean trenches. Wegener

Antarctica—the same landmasses that Wegener said had once made

continents rather than on the wide continental bridge—that

Fossil Climates and Wandering Poles

The Motors That Drive the Continents

One of Wegener’s accomplishments during his years in Hamburg

Wegener’s work strayed outside of his own field of meteorology, a